Of Mice and Men Narrator:

Third Person (Limited Omniscient)

Interestingly, although this narrator could tell us everything that everyone is thinking, feeling and imagining, the storyteller chooses not to. We are given a peek into only one character’s consciousness, and even then only once, when Lennie is in hiding by the river and imagines his Aunt Clara and a large, hallucinatory rabbit. This deliberate withholding of insider information was probably a result of Steinbeck’s intention to have the story be more of a play than a novella. In plays, the audience can only know what the actors are saying and doing – they cannot have access to their thoughts. This means the narrator of this novella is omniscient, but to a rather limited degree.

Still, there might be more to Steinbeck’s choice of a "limited omniscient" narrator. The limited omniscient third person narrator almost seems to mirror the characters of the play; in this hard-hitting, straight-shooting story, it simply wouldn’t be fitting to have a narrator gushing about how everyone feels all the time. The characters of the novella tend to speak volumes with their silences (like when Candy can’t defend his dog, or Crooks can’t defend his status against Curley’s wife, or Lennie clams up around Curley). The ranch isn’t full of guys who like to wax philosophic. Without personal commentary or a narrator’s insight, the characters’ actions and speech alone do the most honest job of getting at who they really are.