Carlson

“He ain’t no good to you, Candy. An’ he ain’t no good to himself. Why’n’t you shoot him, Candy?”

A powerful, big-stomached man came into the bunk house.

“You take it, Carlson. When you see ‘um, don’t give ‘im no chance. Shoot for his guts. That’ll double ‘im over.”

Carlson is the trustworthy worker of the book that people rely on to do a physical job. His character sums up the average American worker at the time. John Steinbeck created Carlson to show that people, at the time, didn’t think that cripples or disabled people are of any use and they should be shot and put out of their own misery. We can see this in chapter three, when Carlson encourages Candy to shoot his own dog because he is old and useless.