Player Piano

Player Piano, written by Kurt Vonnegut, was a novel meant to serve as a warning of what could become of American society if it wasn’t cautious about the advancements that it was making. The time period that this novel was written in was a time of technological advancements, with the assembly line beginning to remove people from their jobs. This mechanization of society was a dominant theme throughout the novel, was definitely solidified by Vonnegut’s use of dark humor, which, although causing a chuckle, caused an uneasy feeling to rise up when the laughter was gone. As unbelievable as the situation portrayed in the novel was, it had a foreboding sense to it that was warning against the dependence on machines, otherwise they would take over our lives. Purpose is the one thing people search for in life, and Vonnegut used Player Piano to show how without a purpose, we are nothing.
My favorite quote from Player Piano was a scene later on in the novel, when one of the young men that Proteus met at the Meadows turns up at a different point of the story, and offers his advice. The quote, on page 279 of my copy, reads:

“I have heard every word you’ve said,” said a young redhead thickly. He wasn’t drinking Benedictine and Pluto water, but sloshed around instead a puddle of whiskey and water on the table as he sat down by buck, facing Doctor Roseberry, uninvited. Beneath his open-necked shirt the red of a Meadows T-shirt showed plainly. “Heard it all,” he said, and he laid his hand on Buck’s shoulder gravely. “Here you are at a crossroads my boy. You’re lucky. Not many crossroads left for people. Nothing but one-way streets with cliffs on both sides.”

I really liked this quote because it says so much about the world in which these people are living, where your options are laid out for you, and there is no way out of anything. The use of the cliff analogy was used to emphasize the desperation of people to succeed, and the horrors that people face if they are deemed below the necessary IQ level. To live in a constant state of fear and obey all commands from those more intelligent than you seems to be the driving force in this society, and freedom of choice has become a lost concept.
This novel, as a whole, was one of my favorites. I really liked Vonnegut’s use of dark humor to create his satire of our society. It was also interesting that the way he created this world was not much different from our current society. Although the machinery in the novel may have been slightly exaggerated in their scope of usage when compared to current times, the exaggeration is a good literary tool for when we turn and look at our own lives. Examining how many machines we have doing our work for us today, it is amazing just how set our world seems on mechanizing the entire work force. People are getting laid off because machines are more efficient, computers are overtaking many job fields, and life is becoming increasingly mechanized. Although Vonnegut was from a different time and place, he had an insight into how the world was progressing that is so accurate in the present times.