The Green Mile: Part 2: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

Three days after Percy chases the mouse down the Green Mile, the mouse reappears during the shift of Percy, Dean, and Bill Dodge. The Pres (an inmate condemned to death for pushing his father out a window but who later saw his sentence commuted to life) complains about the mouse’s presence, but Percy tells him to keep quiet. Percy stares at the mouse menacingly, meanwhile steadily hitting his baton in his hand.

Eager to show Bill what the mouse can do, Dean breaks off a bit of Ritz Cracker and feeds it to the rodent. Bill is impressed by the way in which the mouse eats the cracker with elegance, like a human. Percy makes a denigrating comment about how the sight reminds him “of a nigger eating watermelon,” but no one pays attention to him. When Bill tries to feed the mouse himself, it refuses to take his food. Dean concludes that the mouse is able to differentiate between regulars (such as Dean) and floaters (such as Bill).

When Dean gives the mouse another piece of cracker, Percy, who had been taking aim, suddenly throws his baton at it. However, with incredible agility, the mouse ducks, drops the cracker, and runs away. Angry, Percy chases after him, but the mouse manages to escape once again. Percy’s behavior makes Dean furious, for the guards’ job on the block is to maintain a calm, peaceful atmosphere, and not to give in to violent impulses. By interrupting the tranquility, Percy visibly upset the two inmates present, The Chief and The Pres. Dean’s anger also comes from the fact that he is beginning to consider the mouse as a kind of friend. Percy’s inability to understand this—indeed, his inability to show compassion to any living being—is all the more infuriating.

Dean and Bill, who know that Percy cannot bear to feel humiliated, try to defuse the tension by gently laughing at him while, at the same time, flattering him by complimenting him on his shot. In a more serious tone, Dean and Bill also tell Percy that what he did was unacceptable. They explain that such moments of violence can upset inmates, who might then easily turn violent themselves. Dean repeats what Paul always says: that guards need to talk to the inmates, not make them more nervous than they already are—and yelling is a sign of lack of control. At the end of this speech, Percy storms off, furious at having been reprimanded.

The following night, Dean tells Paul that what Percy doesn’t understand is that he has no real power over the inmates, since the worst that can happen to them is dying on the electric chair—and that that can only happen once. In retrospect, Paul sees Dean’s analysis as a kind of eerie prophecy.