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Quote #10
Mac put out his hand to lift the head. He cried out, and jerked his hand away, and wiped it on his trousers, for there was no face. He looked slowly around, over his shoulder. (268)
In the end, Jim gives up more than his life for the Party: he gives up his identity. His gruesome murder symbolically wipes out his identifying characteristics, so much so that we soon see Mac treating his corpse like the body of any other worker who dies while resisting oppression, rather than as his fallen comrade and BFF. It's about as depressing an ending as Steinbeck could have written—and he's pretty darn good at depressing endings.