Player Piano

A major point that Vonnegut makes in Player Piano is that people sometimes forget what happiness is. Everyone thinks that technology will make things better, easier, and there will be more time to do things that are fun. Technology definitely has its perks, I could make a list of at least a hundred things I couldn’t live without, but sometimes it just makes things boring. Technology can make things so easy that it doesn’t seem like any work was done. For instance, when I am finished typing this, I am going to press publish and I’ll be done with this assignment and have saved a tree, but it doesn’t feel like as much of an accomplishment because it is so easy to just click a few buttons.

Maybe that is a bit of an exaggeration, but look at Bud; he created a machine that does his job better than he can and he no longer has a job. He no longer has a purpose, and there are plenty of real people who are like this. For instance, the ATM has made it unnecessary to have as many bank tellers, and the copy machine has eliminated the job of the scrivener. A big part of life is having a place where one fits in and a purpose, Vonnegut demonstrates this through the examples of technology, and Paul’s struggle to choose a side of the river. Paul relies on technology for so many things that he could not make it on the other side of the river, but he does not want to be run by the machines.

Technology is obviously necessary in today’s world, but where should the line be drawn? Somehow, it needs to be determined how much technology is a good thing, and at what point everyone will literally become a heap of metal unable to do anything for themselves.

This is really an entire passage, but my favorite part is this,
‘“ Well, I’ll be getting back to work. Long as this here is going to be your farm, you might’s well fix the pump. Needs a new packing.’
‘Afraid I don’t know how,’ said Paul.
‘Maybe,’ said Mr. Haycox walking away, ‘Maybe if you had gone to college another ten or twenty years, somebody would have gotten around to showing you how, Doctor,”’ (135).
I love Mr. Haycox! It takes some guts to disrespect your future landlord and boss like that. I also like how he refers to the farm as his before this conversation. I’m not trying to knock education in any way, but Mr. Haycox is right, there are some things that you just can not learn in school no matter how many years you attend. Paul is obviously very bright and works very hard to be able to earn his doctorate, but it is not going to help him fix the pump or do a lot of other things, and this society bases everything off how smart you are when it comes to tests. This entire scene is scary in a way because are society is just like this in so many ways; I mean for years everyone has been preaching to us that you need to get good grades and do well on your SAT’s, or your not going to go college, and you’ll be a failure at life. Just a little bit of an overstatement. School is important, but there are some intangibles that you will never learn there. Most importantly, just because you don’t become a doctor, you are not an idiot, and the world as you know it will not come crumbling down.

When I first started reading Player Piano, I didn’t like it because it was another utopia/ dystopia novel. It just seems that the majority of the novels with that theme are so similar that you could interchange the characters from one story to the other, and that, for the most part, the plots are borrowed from one author to another. Vonnegut’s use of black humor made his novel, which otherwise falls into this category, unique, and I wouldn’t mind reading another one of his novels just to experience more of it.