Everyone is different. People look different from one another and act differently from one another. However, over time, society has set up rules on what kinds of people are normal or ordinary, and who are not. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck, displays two men travelling together during the Great Depression, one of which has a mental disability that causes him to have short-term memory loss and restricted mental development. R.J. Palacio’s, Wonder, set in the modern day, is a novel about a young boy who has a craniofacial aberration and goes to public school for the first time. While the two stories are completely different, they both provide insight into the lives of the people who are not the same as the ordinary person. Lennie Small and August “Auggie” Pullman, …show more content…
Particularly, when Lennie is asked about why he is not in town with everybody else, he responds, “George says I gotta stay here an’ not get in no trouble” (Steinbeck 68). Lennie is constantly being told to stay in the bunkhouse and is being “kept away” from everyone else. The only person he has with him is George. Even then, given a choice between the crowd and Lennie, George chooses the crowd. Because of the rift between him and everyone else, Lennie seeks companionship with other outsiders, like Crooks, but it does not always work out. Additionally, while reflecting on his time at Beecher Prep, August realizes that “… even though people were getting used to [him], no one would actually touch [him]” (Palacio 71). The repeated lack of contact from August’s classmates becomes known as the Plague. As a result of the Plague, no one comes near August in fear of accidentally brushing against him, and that leads to him being isolated from his peers. He is mentally isolated, not physically, because he is still around many people, but in everyone else’s mind, he does not