Player Piano (novel)
LC Class | PS3572.O5 |
Player Piano is the
Plot
While most Americans were fighting in the
The novel develops two parallel plotlines that converge only briefly at the beginning and the end of the story. The more prominent plot centers on Dr. Paul Proteus, the intelligent, 35-year-old manager of Ilium Works. The secondary plot follows the American tour of the Shah of Bratpuhr, a spiritual leader of six million residents in a distant, underdeveloped nation. These provide contrasting perspectives: that of Paul, as the embodiment of what a man within the American industrial system should strive to be, and the other of a visitor from a contrasting culture, but in which there is also a simple binary social system.
The main story follows Paul's development from an uncritical cog in the system to one of its critics. Paul's father had held a supremo status that had given him almost complete control over the nation's economy. Paul has inherited his father's reputation but harbors an uneasy dissatisfaction with the industrial system and his own contribution to society. His acknowledgment of that feeling is heightened when Ed Finnerty, an old friend whom Paul holds in high regard, informs him that he has quit his important engineering job in
Paul and Finnerty visit the "Homestead" section of town, where workers who have been displaced by machines live out their meaningless lives in mass-produced houses. There they meet Lasher, an Episcopal minister with a M.S. in anthropology, who helps the two engineers realize the unfairness of the system from which they have profited. Eventually learning that Lasher is the leader of a rebel group known as the "Ghost Shirt Society", Finnerty instantly takes up with him. Paul is not yet bold enough to make a clean break until his superiors ask him to betray Finnerty and Lasher.
Paul purchases a rundown farm with the intention of starting a new life there with his wife, Anita. She, however, is disgusted by the prospect of such a radically different and less privileged lifestyle. "Of all the people on the north side of the river, Anita was the only one whose contempt for those in Homestead was laced with active hatred.... If Paul …hadn't married her, this was where she'd be, what she'd be."[3] But for the moment, she uses her sexual hold on Paul to convince him to stay and compete with two other engineers, Dr. Shepherd and Dr. Garth, for a more prominent position in Pittsburgh.
While Paul takes part in the annual managerial bonding event at "the Meadows", his superiors tell him that he has been chosen to infiltrate the "Ghost Shirt Society", and rumors of his disloyalty to the system are circulated. Then, after arriving in Homestead, he is kidnapped and drugged by Society operatives and later made the organization's public (but largely nominal) figurehead. Paul's name is famous and so the organization intends to use it to their advantage. However, in the first committee meeting that Paul attends, he is captured during a police raid.
Paul is now put on public trial; but as the general population begins to riot, destroying the automated factories, he is freed. The mob, once unleashed, now goes further than the leaders had planned, destroying all means of production regardless of usefulness. Despite the brief and impressive success of the rebellion, the military quickly surrounds the town, while the population begins to use their innate abilities to rebuild the machines of their own volition. Paul, Finnerty, Lasher, and other committee members of the Society acknowledge that at least they have stood against the government's oppressive system before surrendering themselves.
Major themes
The automation of industry and the effect that it has on society are the predominant themes of Player Piano. It is "a novel about people and machines, and machines frequently got the best of it, as machines will."[4] More specifically, it delves into a theme to which Vonnegut returns, "a problem whose queasy horrors will eventually be made world-wide by the sophistication of machines. The problem is this: How to love people who have no use."[5] Unlike much dystopian fiction, the novel's society was created by indifference, both of the populace and the technology that replaced it. As such, it is the sense of purposelessness of those living in a capitalistic society that has outgrown a need for them that must be rectified.[6]
Mankind's blind faith in technology and its usually-disastrous effect on society as well as the dehumanization of the poor or oppressed later became common themes throughout Vonnegut's work.[7] Throughout his life, Vonnegut continued to believe the novel's themes were of relevance to society, writing, for example, in 1983 that the novel was becoming "more timely with each passing day".[8]
Style
Player Piano displays the beginnings of the idiosyncratic style that Vonnegut developed and employed throughout much of his career. It has early inklings of the hallmark Vonnegutian flair of using
Background
Influences
In a 1973 interview Vonnegut discussed his inspiration to write the book: In the same interview he acknowledges that he "cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We."[9]
Title
A
Publication history
This satirical take on industrialization and the rhetoric of General Electric[10] and the big corporations, which discussed arguments very topical in the postwar United States, was instead advertised by the publisher with the more innocuous and marketable label of "science fiction", a genre that was booming in mass popular culture in the 1950s. Vonnegut, surprised by that reception, wrote, "I learned from reviewers that I was a science-fiction author. I didn't know that." He was distressed because he felt that science fiction was shoved in a drawer which "many serious critics regularly mistake... for a urinal" because "[t]he feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works."[4]
Player Piano was later released in paperback by Bantam Books in 1954 under the title Utopia 14[2] in an effort to drive sales with readers of science fiction. Paul Proteus' trial was dramatized in the 1972 TV movie Between Time and Timbuktu, which presented elements from various works by Vonnegut.[11]
In 2009, Audible.com produced an audio version of Player Piano, narrated by Christian Rummel, as part of its Modern Vanguard line of audiobooks.
In the Italian translation, Player Piano is rendered as Piano meccanico, a
Reception
The science fiction anthologist
Player Piano was nominated for the International Fantasy Award in 1953.[15]
See also
References
- ^ "Books Published Today". The New York Times. August 18, 1952. p. 15.
- ^ ISBN 1-85723-124-4.
- ^ Chapter XVIII, pp. 150–151
- ^ a b Vonnegut, Kurt (1974). Wampeters, Foma & Granfaloons. The Dial Press. p. 1.
- ^ Vonnegut, Kurt (1965). God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Dell. p. 183.
- ^ a b Grossman, Edward (July 1974). "Vonnegut & His Audience". Commentary.
- ^ Westbrook, Perry D., "Kurt Vonnegut Jr.: Overview". Contemporary Novelists. Susan Windisch Brown. 6th ed. New York: St. James Press, 1996.
- ISBN 978-1-78074-749-1.
- ^ a b "Kurt Vonnegut Interview". Playboy. July 1973. Archived from the original on February 10, 2009. Retrieved September 26, 2015.
- ^ Interview from Bagombo Snuff Box [1], quote: "It is a lampoon on GE. I bit the hand that used to feed me."
- Between Time and Timbuktu or Prometheus-5. Script by David O'Dell. Delta Books.
- ^ "Galaxy's 5 Star Shelf", Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1953, p.96
- F&SF, March 1953, p.93
- ^ "Recommended Reading", F&SF, April 1953, p.98
- ^ Locus Index to SF Awards
Further reading
- Marvin, Thomas F. Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. Print.
- Seed, David. "Mankind vs. Machines: The Technological Dystopia in Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano", in Impossibility Fiction: Alternativity, Extrapolation, Speculation, ed. Littlewood, Derek; Stockwell, Peter. Atlanta, GA: Editions Rodopi B.V., 1996. Print.
External links
- Player Piano title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database