Player Piano, author Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, was published in 1952. It is a dystopia of automation [1] and capitalism, describing the dereliction they cause in the quality of life. [1] The story takes place in a near-future society that is almost totally mechanized, eliminating the need for human laborers. This widespread mechanization creates conflict between the wealthy upper class—the engineers and managers who keep society running—and the lower class, whose skills and purpose in society have been replaced by machines. The book uses irony and sentimentality, which were to become a hallmark developed further in Vonnegut's later works. [1]
Summary Player Piano is set in the future after a fictional third world war. During the war, while most Americans were fighting overseas, the nation's managers and engineers faced a depleted work force, and responded by developing ingenious automated systems that allowed the factories to operate with only a few workers. The novel begins ten years after the war, when most factory workers have been replaced by machines. The bifurcation of the population is represented by the division of Ilium into "The Homestead", where everyone who is neither a manager or engineer lives, and the other side of the river, where all the engineers and managers lives.
Player Piano develops two parallel plot lines that converge only briefly, and insubstantially so, at the beginning and the end of the novel. The more prominent plot line follows the protagonist, Dr. Paul Proteus (hither to referred to as Paul), an intelligent, thirty-five-year-old factory manager of Ilium Works. The ancillary plot line follows the American tour of the Shah of Bratpuhr, a spiritual leader of six million residents in a distant, underdeveloped nation. The purpose of the two plot lines is to give two perspectives of the system: one from an insider who is emblematic of the system, and one from an outsider who is looking in. Paul, for all intents and purposes, is the living embodiment of what a man within the system should strive to be, while the Shah is a visitor from a very different culture, and therefore applies a very different context to happenings he sees on his tour.
The main plot line follows the metamorphosis of Paul from being within the system to being against the system. At the beginning of the novel, Paul displays a sense of dissatisfaction with the industrial system and his contribution to society. Symbolically, he reflects on his colleagues' desire to destroy an old building, once a part of Edison's factory, which he saves and instead keeps it alive to store new machinery. Looking for salvation from a yet unknown plight, he gets a knock at his door, figuratively speaking, and Ed Finnerty, an old friend whom Paul has always held in high regard, informs him he has quit his important engineer job in Washington D.C. Paul and Finnerty visit a bar in 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 an Episcopal minister, named Lasher, with an M.A. in anthropology, who puts into words the unfairness of the system that the two engineers have only vaguely sensed. They soon learn that Lasher is the leader of a rebel group known as the "Ghost Shirt Society", and Finnerty instantly takes up with him. Paul is not bold enough to make a clean break, as Finnerty has done, until his superiors ask him to betray Finnerty and Lasher.
He quits his job and is captured by the "Ghost Shirt Society;" he is forced to join as their leader but only in name. Paul's father was the first "National, Industrial, Commercial Communications, Foodstuffs, and Resources Director"” As his lengthy title suggests, Dr. George Proetus has almost complete control over the nation’s economy and was more powerful than the President of the United States. Through his father's success, Paul's name is famous among the citizens, so the organization intends to use his name to their advantage by making him the false 'leader' to gain publicity. [4]
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