Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano

A common characteristic embodied in dystopian texts is the criticism of an existing trend, a societal norm, or a political system. A more in-depth analysis of dystopic texts suggest that not only are the authors critiquing certain aspects of society, they are also cautioning their readers of possible futures based on current issues concerning our world today. Beneath the underlying deception of a novel describing an abysmal society, authors of dystopian texts are warning their readers that the future is contingent on the present and that their actions will lead to certain consequences, as depicted in the Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 science fiction novel, ‘Player Piano’, which focuses on the role of machinery, the question of human worth, and the

The segregation between the two large groups in the novel are one of the main issues which the author addresses in order to exemplify a possible future based on our current actions. Vonnegut’s confronting rhetorical sentence “How’s somebody going to up his I.Q.?” expresses his personal viewpoint on the biasness of the system in his novel and the complexity of injustice which could possibly occur in our world. The statement “By eliminating human error through machinery, and needless competition through organization, we’ve raised the standard of living of the average man immensely” incorporates the author’s satirical commentary of how the consequence of raising a man’s standard of living simultaneously takes away a man’s worth in the world. Instead of striving towards progress, the dark truth behind this dystopian world is the fact that they are losing their reason of life. This idea is furthermore incorporated into the mechanical diction of the sentence “You people have engineered them out of their part in the economy, in the market place, and they’re finding out- most of them- that what’s left is just about zero” which suggests the insignificant amount of human capability needed after the process of mechanization. Vonnegut uses his text to demonstrate how the consequence of a mechanized world is

Characters in the novel are illustrated to be so absentmindedly drawn to the idea of mechanical progress that they begin to abandon and overlook the simple aspects of life. The scientific diction used in the line “Anita had the mechanics of marriage down” expresses how machinery has already engraved itself into normal way of life through incorporating it in a common form of human connection. The degradation of displaying human emotions is exemplified in the sentence “EPICAC XIV could consider simultaneously hundreds of even thousands of sides of a question utterly fairly... wholly free of reason-muddying emotions” where emotions are described as negatively effecting ones judgement. “He’d learned to make mechanical drawings. What else? He’s learned to bounce a ball off several walls with skill. What else?” The simple rhetorical sentence questioning a man’s ability to do basic activities indicates the huge loss of human abilities while simultaneously describing the detrimental effect which machinery holds towards humans. Hence, Vonnegut comments on our society and portrays loss of human nature as a possible shocking consequence of mechanization, allowing readers to question the path in which society is heading