Player Piano: Chapter 7

Vonnegut decides to use this chapter to shit all over the American military. Now, don't start getting all red-faced and shifting uncomfortably in your seat! He doesn't shit on the soldiers themselves! A good portion of this is from the perspective of a private who, I imagine, thinks the thoughts Vonnegut probably thought quite a few times while he was serving, thoughts about the kind of venemous and disrespectful things he'd love to say directly to his commanders once he's a civilian again and they can't punish him for it.

The Shah of Bratpuhr is in the scene to, once again, point out that Americans, especially these Americans in the military, sure do act an awful lot like slaves (Takaru in his language), no matter what you call them. Halyard tries to convince him, yet again, that they aren't slaves but it only confuses the Shah.

"Niki Takaru!" he cried, exhaling a strong effluvium of Sumklish.
    "No Takaru!" said Doctor Halyard. "Sol-dee-yers."
    "No Takaru?" said the Shah in puzzlement.
    "What's he say?" said General of Armies Bromley.
    "Said they're a fine bunch of slaves," said Halyard. He turned to the Shah again and waggled his finger at the small, dark man. "No Takaru. No, no, no."
    Khashdrahr seemed baffled, too, and offered Halyard no help in clarifying the point.
    "Sim koula Takaru, akka sahn salet?" said the Shah to Khashdrahr.
    Khashdrahr shrugged and looked questioningly at Halyard. "Shah says, if these not slaves, how you get them to do what they do?"
    "Patriotism," said General of the Armies Bromly sternly. "Patriotism, damn it."
    "Love of country," said Halyard.
    Khashdrahr told the Shah, and the Shah nodded slightly, but his look of puzzlement did not disappear. "Sidi ba—" he said tentatively.
    "Eh?" said Corbett.
    "Even so—" translated Khashdrahr, and he looked as doubtful as the Shah.

What an extraordinary example of why I love Vonnegut so much. He simply and elegantly describes the truth of the situation while including the lies Americans tell themselves to obfuscate that truth. In just a few, uncomplicated lines from 1952, he exposes the virtue signaling at the heart of patriotism. The soldiers do what they're told by men they hate in a job they didn't choose (remember, the machines made it so that most people have to either be soldiers or crew for maintaining the country's infrastructure) and everybody chooses to believe it's a noble and patriotic decision. I'm certain every person on Twitter who's constantly complaining about cancel culture would fucking cancel Kurt Vonnegut in a heartbeat for being some commie socialist liberal wank just because of this short scene. In actuality, Vonnegut is a creative genius who understands fucking America.

Player Piano: Chapter 6

Why Paul's wife, Anita? That's the question that popped into my head during this chapter where Anita won't let Paul sleep because she's anxious that he's going to lose the promotion to Pittsburgh and he doesn't seem to care. She's seen how Finnerty's arrival has done something to her husband that she doesn't like. The sad thing is that what Finnerty has done has uplifted Paul in some way; Finnerty's allowed Paul to see that he doesn't have to live the enervating simulacrum of a life he's been living. He's given Paul a glimpse that maybe life doesn't have to be the life everybody expects from you, and maybe the life you've always felt obligated to live. And maybe that's what Anita fears most. She isn't just worried about their social standing and Paul's lack of ambition; she realizes that she is also part of that life Paul felt forced into. She's losing him.

Anita comes off as a shrew and maybe that's a stereotypical wife trope that's lived way longer than it should have. I blame the Adam and Eve myth that generally puts the wait of the sin on Eve and allows Adam to be a passive instrument in her nagging and temptation. But Vonnegut's twisting the myth somewhat here. In this case, Finnerty is the snake in the garden tempting Adam. Eve desperately doesn't want her helpmeet to lose his innocence. She wants the lie of Eden to survive. Mankind has built a sham Garden of Eden where everybody is supposedly cared for and happy and Finnerty has just slithered on in to tear it all down.

This short chapter also deals with some of Paul's father issues which crept up last chapter concerning Kroner. He's the patriarch and mentor of the organization, so much so that everybody calls his wife "Mom." Paul feels inadequate around him and has an innate need to please him. But that need is what has driven Paul's life, that need to make his own father proud. I've always said that the reason I lack ambition is that I don't give a fuck what my father thinks of me. It's apparently a pretty serious driving force in a young man's life. Anita has tried to use this against Paul (or to help him succeed which is sort of the same thing since Paul doesn't really care about the idea of "succeeding"). Early in their marriage, she framed a picture of Paul's father to place in the bedroom. This is a man she had never met. But she admired his success and his drive and projected all of that onto Paul (as has Kroner and probably everybody else in Paul's orbit). So now he has to live up to that picture of his father in the bedroom too! Ghastly!

If Paul eventually tries to embezzle from the company and smashes some of its machines and winds up being happier on the Reconstruction and Reclamation Crew, I'm going to assume Mike Judge's Office Space is the movie version of Player Piano. Except for the wife part. Even in the late 20th Century, comedies, for some reason, needed to also be romantic meet cute films so Peter needed to be single. But we still get a brief glimpse of the Anita role when the movie begins and his Anita (whose name is Anne! So close!) spends a short amount of screen time in the movie trying to get Peter to care more about success and eventually breaking up with him when he stops caring about work completely. His obligatory drive to succeed didn't need a wife anyway because he lives in America where the Garden of Eden illusion of safety and happiness is built around the capitalist idea of making more and more money, no matter how unhappy you are. In this chapter, Paul wonders at Finnerty's ability to quit his job, a quality that seems so foreign to him. How does one simply upend one's life so easily? What kind of courage must that take?

When I saw Office Space, I was like, "Yep. That's the world!" But I don't remember having the same feeling after reading Player Piano. I'm fairly certain I've read a lot of books in my life where I just enjoyed them without thinking too much about them. Or, and this is probably more true, I just forgot how much I thought about them because I just moved on to other things without writing any of my thoughts down. Which is why I've begun all these blogs in my 40s. I need to remember this crap! Office Space was so viscerally true and yet I'd never had an office job. But what I had learned and understood (thanks to my Grandfather, no doubt) was that a person in debt was never actually free. I always avoided debt (and, yes, I was privileged in many ways to be able to avoid debt, having no accidents, a strong family safety net, and a state college degree from the early 90s (so inexpensive! Sorry, Millennials and those who came after. Us Gen Xers maybe haven't been granted the resources and capital of the greedy Boomers but we, at least, lived in a world where we could be apathetic bean bag sitters and not have to worry too much overall) mostly because I wanted the freedom to say "I quit" to any job that made me feel like, and ultimately expected me to just take it because I had to, a corporate wage slave.

Again, I want to boldface this: I was lucky enough to choose to not go into debt. Many, many people simply have it forced on them because of capitalism. My grandparents, who lived three houses down from my mom's house (more privilege, really!), were instrumental in showing me how to live, and allowing me in many supportive ways, my best life. They were the best people I've ever known and I was lucky enough to be related to them.

Player Piano: Chapter 5

The chapter begins with Paul Proteus concerned about impressing his colleagues and bosses but ends with Paul Proteus seeing Finnerty's point of view and seeing the ridiculousness of the entire system. Paul's wife, Anita, is not happy.

Paul's presentation to his co-workers is about the first and second Industrial Revolutions. The first one, he says, devalued muscle work. The machines created were much more efficient than man's muscles could ever be. They were stronger and could work longer hours. The second Industrial Revolution devalued mind-numbing, repetitive labor. Machines could now take over all the rote tasks with far fewer rejected units than a factory worker bored by the job and concerned with other aspects of their life, which left them prone to making mistakes. He doesn't get into the potential of the inevitable third Industrial Revolution because the checkers tournament against the machine at the end of the chapter puts a spotlight on that.

Paul is the Ilium Works checkers champion and it's tradition to play incoming engineers to defend his title. This year, the new recruits have brought in a checkers playing computer to beat Paul. At first Paul wants to concede, knowing that any machine built for a specific purpose will inevitably be better at that purpose than a human counterpart. But his pal Finnerty encourages him to play and makes bets with everybody there that Paul will win. Which he does because had seen, looking inside the machine, that it had a loose connection which causes it to catch fire. Finnerty's confidence wasn't that a man could beat a machine but that a machine will break down under the right conditions. I mean, a man will too! But a machine does it immediately and with lots of smoke and fire.

Everybody is upset that Finnerty didn't say anything about the loose connection but he couldn't give a shit about their concerns.

"'If Checker Charley was out to make chumps out of men, he could damn well fix his own connections. Paul looks after his own circuits; let Charley do the same. Those who live by electronics, die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis.'"

We're going ever deeper into the philosophical question, "What is freedom?" At what point have the machines gone from freeing men to pursue their hopes, dreams, and happiness to enslaving man into roles as simple caretakers for the machines? And those who don't understand the machines? Well, they have to earn their reason for existence some other way. But since the machines are doing everything, their options are limited. Provide a reason for your existence as a citizen of your nation by either joining the army or filling potholes. An interesting note is that Vonnegut sees exactly the way America would wind up in a system where machines do all the work. It would still demand some kind of proof from everybody that they deserve to be "taken care of" by the government. Notably, Star Trek: The Next Generation bases their world in roughly the same environment but sees it differently. With machines and replicators available to do all the work, nobody needs to feel obligated to do anything they don't want to do. They are truly free to pursue any activity they want. In the Star Trek universe, everybody is taken care of when machines meet all needs. In Vonnegut's world (which is more realistic), the people in charge of the machines don't feel any obligation to provide for the people who don't own the machines and are no longer playing a part in the economic system. They're simply leeches and parasites who have to provide some service if they want any income at all. So it's the army or the Reconstruction and Reclamation Works.

Notably, there has yet to be any real discussion about artists and entertainment. Presumably, like the bartender, these careers still exist. Vonnegut still has two hundred pages to bring them up so I'm not yet going to assume they make the entire parable too messy. It's possible art has also been devalued by the efficiency of machines to the economy and it's just looked down upon as silly and a waste of time. If that's the case, I'm sure Finnerty's cohorts and revolutionaries will all be playwrights and poets.

Oh wait! I forgot this book is called Player Piano and there was that scene with the player piano! So Vonnegut has already shown how machines have, in at least some way, taken away the livelihoods of artists. And we saw that there was no connection between the artist and their audience; there was no crucial interaction or play between the art and the reaction, as you might expect with a piano player at a bar. Instead, it was just "five cents worth of joy" and the piano was done. It was a simple financial interaction; art had become a commodity.

Another theme in this chapter was how nepotism affected this new world. The guy who brought Checker Charley wasn't really smart enough to have become an engineer. But his father (who built the machine) was well known and well liked so Paul's boss went to bat for the kid, even if he was mostly a dumb jerk.

"Ordinarily, nobody would have hired him. But Kroner, who knew his bloodlines, had taken him on anyway and sent him to Ilium to be trained. The break had done anything but teach him humility. He took it as evidence that his money and name could beat the system any time and, paraphrased, he'd said as much. The hell of it was that his attitude won grudging admiration from his fellow engineers, who had got their jobs the hard way. Paul supposed, gloomily, that beaters of systems had always been admired by the conventional."

Reading something like this from 1952 by a fucking genius is depressing. This was America. This is America. This will always be America. What good is art that points out this bullshit if the "conventional" never read it, never learn from it, never fucking care? This is why all of my favorite books are the ones where the protagonists realize what Matthew Broderick realized in Wargames: the only way to win is not to play the game. You know, books like Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and, more recently, Gravity's Rainbow. Although nobody really wins in Gravity's Rainbow; Slothrop just sort of disappears from everybody's sight and vanishes into legend. But the sentiment is still there because Pynchon still shows how Pirate Prentice and Katje and others all realize that they're still working for the system when they choose to fight against it.

One of the things I've always believed having grown up on the West Coast is that even though we think of history as people fighting against tyranny and changing the world, what history really was was people fleeing westward instead of fighting to set up their own systems. Then the people subjugated and oppressed by those systems fled west to set up their own systems. Until there was no more west to flee to and the West Coast had all the misfits and anti-establishment revolutionaries bottled up trying to figure out the best way to live together. But this is also why, eventually, we're going to need a huge fight. Because we have nowhere left to run and we can't live with this bullshit system for much longer.

Player Piano: Chapter 4

In this chapter, we meet Finnerty. Finnerty's buzzer has recently gone off although his red light's been blinking for years. Finnerty's only friend is Paul Proteus and, I think, Paul's only friend is Finnerty. Finnerty's friendly interest in Paul was stemmed by his ability to see Paul's red light flashing so many years ago, even when Paul couldn't rightly see it. Paul's need to fit in and live a normal life has finally worn away and he's beginning to see the cracks in the system and how he's always been a bit on the outside. It was the cat. The cat totally did it. Especially since it was his fault the cat died. He was just trying to give it a normal life inside the normal confines of society's normality by taking it out of the alley and putting it inside a warehouse full of machines. But the cat didn't belong there and the machines killed it. Just like they've been killing Paul; he just didn't see it until that damn cat.

But Paul is still not sure. He rebuffs Finnerty's call to skip the work conference and discuss what's next. Finnerty just quit his job and he's ready to change everything. But Paul's a bit too invested in his life yet. He's got the wife, Anita, who desperately wants him to rise in the ranks of his career and needs her peers to see how well they're doing. She is his ambition since Paul really doesn't seem to care. And Paul's got his job and his standing and the obligation to his father and his intelligence and to the rest of society. Plus this is just Chapter 4! He's just not ready yet! But the cat and Finnerty have spoken and Paul's red light is blinking a little bit faster and that buzzer is just dying to let people know Paul Proteus is finally broken.

Finnerty's ready to see the world burn. But Paul has dismissed him. For now.

Player Piano: Chapter 3

Should we discuss the name of the protagonist, Paul Proteus? And by "we" I mean "I" and by "discuss" I mean "soliloquize." So protean means able to change easily or to transform. That's a pretty good name for a protagonist in a dystopian world, right?! Although this world isn't dystopian at first glance; we've been told it's efficient and perfect! By Paul himself! So I guess that's the change that's going to have to occur. Paul Proteus is going to transform the way he sees the world. And then he probably won't be able to accept the status quo anymore and he'll either rise up to bring it all down with an army of mice or he'll hang himself in a lonely motel room in New Mexico.

I've read this before but I can't remember which one he chooses!

Oh, I didn't discuss his first name, Paul. It probably has something to do with the apostle. And by "probably" I mean . . . wait, am I doing this tired joke again? I fucking hate myself. Anybody who knows anything about Saul of Tarsus gets why Paul Proteus is called Paul. He's all "These Roman machines are great and all these Luddites following that Messiah are nincompoops!" And then he'll be driving home from work one day and crash into a tree due to sudden onset blindness. Afterward, he'll be all, "Tear down the machines! They're vile temptresses destroying our souls!" That's the "I'm a total moron" take. Somebody with more ambition and a higher intelligence could probably make a nice academic paper out of this (and probably already has!).

In this chapter, we learn that Paul is as responsible a gun owner as modern day gun owners.

"He had had the car at the time of the riots, and among the bits of junk in the glove compartment—match cards, registration, flashlight, and face tissues—was the rusty pistol he had been issued then. Having a pistol where some unauthorized person might get at it was very much against the law. [. . .] Paul didn't want the pistol but was forever forgetting to turn it in. Over the years, as it had accumulated a patina of rust, he'd come to regard it as a harmless antique. The glove compartment wouldn't lock, so Paul covered the pistol with tissues."

I bet that pistol kills somebody before this is over! For maximum drama, maybe it'll be a young person, or a dog!

Paul is the most highly paid man in Ilium and yet he continues to drive an old clunker of a car. That means he's connected to the past and, in some deeper way, refuses to truly accept this newfangled future. His wife makes excuses for him and his car to her peers so as to not feel embarrassed by this outward sign of poverty, or his lack of caring about the accoutrements of their social and financial standing. Paul does not seem to care about impressing the other wealthy people. But when he goes across the river to purchase whisky, he changes into an old leather jacket. He seems embarrassed not by some old car driven in a wealthy neighborhood but by any show of wealth among those who don't have as much. Probably because he and his machines are a big part of the reason they don't have as much.

Paul stops at a bar on the way home to pick up a bottle of whisky for an old friend. While in the bar, the reader gets a glimpse of another profession that hasn't been taken over by machines: the bartender. Besides managers and engineers, a few other professions have remained because they're just not economical enough to be done by machines. Or, as almost certainly is the case of the bartender (evidenced by a short memory from Paul about trying to set up an automated bar and failing), people just can't seem to make the transition to dealing with machines in certain venues. Who wants to lose the camaraderie of a neutral participant in their mostly monologued conversation when out drinking alone? How is a machine going to play lightweight psychiatrist to the lost and the damned? It's just not the same.

Paul is recognized by one of the clientele. It's Rudy Hertz, the man whose lathing skills were translated to tape to be used by the Ilium Works machines. Rudy is a man whose skills were needed and so a corporation took those skills and disposed of Rudy. Rudy doesn't seem to be filled with resentment though; those years are far distant in his past and he's maybe grown a bit senile. He makes a big deal of knowing the great Doctor Paul Proteus which attracts the attention, and resentment, of the other clientele. Most of them are old enough to remember their lives before the machines took over; most of them see in Paul the reason they lost their livelihoods and their passions, their stability and income.

One man raises a toast to their sons and speaks directly to Paul. His son just turned eighteen and was not able to secure one of twenty-seven places available at the college. His future choice is now that of simply the army or government work in the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps. Basically no decision at all. He wants more for his son but, with the machines and limited space for engineers and thinkers, there isn't any. The machines have taken all the more there was.

The punctuation of the chapter comes with Rudy Hertz playing a tune, in celebration of meeting his old friend Doctor Paul Proteus, on the player piano.

"'See—see them two go up and down, Doctor! Just the way the feller hit 'em. Look at 'em go!"
    The music stopped abruptly, with the air of having delivered exactly five cents worth of joy. Rudy still shouted. 'Makes you feel kind of creepy, don't it, Doctor, watching them keys go up and down? You can almost see a ghost sitting there playing their heart out.'"

And that's the book! Twenty-eight pages in and we've got it, Kurt! Thanks! Do I need to read the other 270 pages?! You blew your load with the scene that suggested the title way too early! I mean, most of us got the idea from Paul checking out the tape on the lathe machine in the first chapter. But that was just a hint at the idea! This is just pulling your dick out and showing us!

That's okay though. I trust Kurt Vonnegut to tell me lots of other things I should be angry about in an entertaining way that makes me cry while asking, "Am I happy? Sad? Angry? Why are these tears happening?!"

Player Piano: Chapter 2

If somebody were curious about Kurt Vonnegut and had never read anything by him before, I'd probably have them read Chapter 2 of Player Piano to decide if maybe they'd want to read more. It's like mainlining Vonnegut. For those ideological conservative thinkers, it stands as a stark warning that the things they believe will be brutally and effectively criticized. Do they want more of that? They probably think they don't but I'd say they damn well do need more of it.

The scene consists of Doctor Halyard, a member of the U.S. State Department, showing the Shah of Bratpuhr around New York in a limousine. The Shah is described as rich and fat, almost certainly off the backs of the six million people he's said to be leader of. They pass by a road crew and the Shah asks whose slaves they are. Halyard proceeds to explain capitalism to him and merely winds up convincing the Shah that "citizen" means "slave" and that capitalism is communism. The only differences are the words used to describe the machinery of it all.

To me, the only problem with the Shah thinking Halyard's U.S. is communism is that capitalism actually does communism's job much better. Convince people they're free to choose their jobs and to do what you choose and they'll fight like hell to keep up the illusion. Convince them that a mortgage and kids are the American dream and now they need the constant stream of income that only the great and miraculous job providers can promise them. Maybe tie their health care to the job so they can't leave the job without putting risk to their family and their family's finances. And then maybe, when you've convinced them that taxes are out of control so that they support the highest tax brackets dropping to almost nothing which then makes more sense for business owners and management to give themselves even more of the profit in personal salaries and bonuses instead of putting that money back into the company, you can even take away the free healthcare and the pension and every other promise of a middle class capitalist life. Next, convince them that all of these things were unearned benefits that people shouldn't expect to get by constantly using manipulative language and calling those things entitlements. Get the media to use your language so that it just becomes another fact of life. Pensions, health care, and living wages all become things you have to work hard and fight for (yet again because fighting for them the first time, well, that was ancient history and probably it was an un-American thing to do at the time. Damn anarchists!). But don't fight the corporations and the government! Fight your fellow workers as you struggle to keep your shitty job so charitably given to you by the great and magnificent job provider. As corporations take control of the government, the most important thing is to keep people dependent on the ever shittier jobs offered to them. Every program which the government might have in place as a safety net against poverty or as a means to make life better for everybody must be shut down because if they exist, people will actually feel free enough to not accept work contracts on the worst terms. Corporations need citizens working without a safety net or else the citizen might actually have the ability to choose jobs that offer a real chance at living.

Predatory college tuition has wound up working the same way. If you can't control the educated masses in the same way you control the non-college working class, you just come up with basically the same system! Saddle them with debt so they're forced into the labor force on your terms. They don't come out with a leg up because of their education. They begin life loaded with debt. Yes, a percentage of them will find the exchange worth it. But what can you do? You can't funnel everybody into the slave-labor class! Some are going to get away and get actual jobs they love that provide them with everything they need in every sense. But just label them the elite and "other" the fuck out of them so the working class people think of them as the enemy. How dare they feel fulfilled in their easy ivory tower cushioned offices where they, I don't know, make money by reading Tolstoy or some shit? Have they ever actually had a callous?! Probably not! So un-American! But the others who don't come out of college with a well-paying job are your real targets! The ones who go to college, get loads of debt, and then come out the other side without any real prospects for a lengthy and fulfilling career. You'll have them by the balls, by gum!

A college education is something I think everybody should have, for loads of various reasons. But at this point in time . . . with this cost? I'm no longer sure. Maybe we should just hand out a syllabus of mandatory reading to all graduating high school students and say, "Take a year off. Live at home (like you'd probably do anyway!). Read all of these. Take them in. Absorb them. Don't think of them as a means of escape and entertainment. These are your training manuals. Digest the fuck out of them and learn to fight. Because America isn't giving you shit anymore. America sees its citizens as parasites. If you don't have the money to establish a lobbying firm, America sees you as nothing put a pest in its garden. So take these books and read them, learn from them, and be angry."

America has not been what it purports to be for some time. No longer are we the land of the free and the home of the brave. Now, America is where we signal our virtue while not actually doing anything to make the country better. We praise our troops while not actually caring for them or avoiding unnecessary wars. We praise our economy and laud stock market growth while letting people fall into poverty and starve. We celebrate a (not really but a lot of people think it's true) Christian nature while putting our hand on Jesus's face as we push him back and mutter, "Not now, Messiah." For anybody wondering what America actually is, we should simply remind them that our government decided to start calling French fries "Freedom Fries" when they got annoyed with France for not doing what they wanted them to do. That's about the extent of our bipartisanship ability to get things done.

In the world of Player Piano, those whose jobs have been taken over by machines now must either work for government labor crews or join the armed forces. That's the freedom allowed by privatization of everything. Although that's still a better world than what America is becoming because at least in Vonnegut's world, the machines and the incomes of the wealthy are taxed enough to pay the salaries of everybody else. In our current America, it's nearly the same thing except the wealthy aren't taxed and the poor are told they're lazy fuckers who feel entitled to life, liberty, and happiness which, according to the part of the Declaration of Independence that apparently never gets read, is only for those who work hard at shitty jobs and shut the fuck up about maybe making things better for everybody.

Player Piano: Chapter I

It's been a few decades since I first read Player Piano. I'm re-reading it—as well as all of Vonnegut's other novels, in order—because I've gotten older and I've forgotten everything from when I was younger. It's like, why even read books if you're going to forget so much about those books when you're older and then have to re-read them again just to remember if you liked them or not? The main thing I remember about Vonnegut's early novels like Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan, and Cat's Cradle is how different in style they are compared to Vonnegut's later books. They seem more like pulp science fiction than his informal stories that are also kind of chats with his readers while also sort of being essays at the same time. Reading a Vonnegut book is sometimes like watching a movie for the first time with the director's audio commentary playing. Was he the forerunner of audiences enjoying watching other people watch things? I wouldn't know because I don't know about everything. But it seems like Vonnegut definitely is a voice within a lot of his own books commenting on his books as he's writing them.

Or maybe I'm just remembering things poorly. Remember how I don't remember anything?!

Player Piano begins, ostensibly, with the protagonist, Paul Proteus, making sure a cat is comfortable. I don't know if I'm supposed to root for this man or if he'll become a monster or what the story will be but I can say that, from the beginning, Vonnegut manages to get me to love him, at least just a little bit, because he is caring for a cat, even when he, himself, is nervous and anxious. He must be a good person, right?

Right from the start, the cat seems an odd and unlikely part of Paul Proteus's world. He's brought it to the Ilium Works to hunt mice and rats who sometimes chew through wires. Since just about everything is run by machines, seen over by managers and engineers, keeping them up and running is crucial. The world has been at peace for over a decade and the know-how of engineers and their machines have made it possible. But Paul, like farmers across thousands of years, still needs a few cats. Machines allow everybody to live a work-free life of luxury in a world where war has been extinguished and yet it can all fall apart from a few stupid rats. Machines do the work while sensors alert managers to problems and managers send engineers to fix the issues. But cats? Cats prevent any of that from happening in the first place.

What the novel supposes is an automated world created by man that can't completely divorce itself from nature and natural cycles. Man has come up with a machine for everything but he still hasn't invented a better mousetrap.

One side effect to having a world run so efficiently is ennui. Paul knows the people who risked their lives in the war to give the engineers time to make the world more efficient are absolutely certain the world is a far better place, but he, having not seen the horrors of war firsthand, can only take their word for it. All he sees is that the world is improved, it has become more efficient, and he's got less to do with it now than a stray cat.

At one point, the cat is terrified by a sweeping machine that passes through the office just after Paul looks at an old photograph from after Edison had the first building built many decades previous and notes that even the sweeper beams with pride. I think there's a lot of thematic stuff going on there that I'd discuss if they were more subtle!

In contemplating a piece of tape that houses the machine code for lathing shafts, he remembers the man whose movements the tape's commands were recorded from. A man who was proud to be chosen for the assignment with little understanding that he was destroying the source of his pride. A man who, though he had been close to retiring, almost certainly wasn't ready for the skills he had learned to never again be needed by another man. A man who loved The Bible and loved a dog and never had any children. A man who probably no longer existed. At any rate, a man who was definitely no longer needed.

And then the cat is killed. I don't want it to be. I want it to live forever, even if it's fictional. But it is both literally and figuratively chewed up and spit out by this modern technology. These machines grind up anything natural and dispose of it as useless, organic garbage. Like Rudy the lathe operator before it. A cat might be able to help with the mice but it simply can't exist among these machines. There is no room for it. There is only machines and codes and the occasional blinking red light to call forth a single human to tweak some loose bolt or lost nut. The cat survives the garbage chute but is killed trying to escape over an electrified fence and found by a guard in a armored and machine-gun-laden car. The fence and armored car has been put there to keep disgruntled Luddites from sabotaging the machinery. Laws have also been enacted to enforce the safety of the Ilium Works. And so with the death of the cat, we get a first glimpse at how this perfect, efficient world might be simply an expensive mirage to keep the status quo. So what if people, maybe, aren't completely happy or fulfilled? So what if the occasional cat is killed by the system? Things are running smoothly. And besides, it was just a cat. And, you know, people.

Paul doesn't want to leave the cat but doesn't know what to do with it. There's feelings of guilt and responsibility; something in Paul feels the need to do right by the cat. But by the end of the chapter, he's been overwhelmed with his upcoming speech, a possible job promotion, an old friend coming in to see him, and his wife's rote and shallow conversation full of agenda and manipulations. He has Katharine, his secretary, just get rid of it.

The chapter ends discussing the machine whose blinking red light had sent Paul out of his office but, in reality, is talking about Paul.

"'Beyond help,' he said. Lathe group three, Building 58, had been good in its day, but was showing wear and becoming a misfit in the slick, streamlined setup, where there was no place for erratic behavior. 'Basically, it wasn't built for the job it's doing anyway. I look for the buzzer to go off any day now, and that'll be the end.'
        In each meter box, in addition to the instrument, the jewel, and the warning lamp, was a buzzer. The buzzer was the signal for a unit's complete breakdown."

I don't want to read a whole lot of novels that deal with the death of a cat but if Vonnegut is going to use it as the impetus to knock his protagonist out of complacency with the status quo, I suppose I'll allow it.