Leonard Mustazza - Forever Pursuing the Genesis
The Machine Within - Player Piano

33
Vonnegut's artistic originality lies, I think, precisely ih his deliberate avoidance of easy categorisation, his refusal to write derivative formula fiction, an nowhere is his originality of vision better displayed than in his first novel, Player Piano.

34
What I would like to suggest here is that, rather than exploring the extent to which the novel is derivative or classifiable, we apply the question of genre to Vonnegut's narrative technique. When we do that, we discover something quite surprising that reveals both Vonnegut's awareness of his literary predecessors and his own unique view of such concepts as political and personal freedom and the human condition generally.
Through roughly the first half of Player Piano, Vonnegut writes--quite deliberately, I am convinced--a standard and ostensibly derivative dystopian novel... Paul Proteus's discontent with his lot and his society is very much like that of Orwell's Winstton Smith or Huxley's Bernard Marx. What is more, Paul's search for an "Edenic alternative"--presented precisely in those mythic terms--is also doomed to failurbecause it is to remote from the concerns of his society. Following that failure, however, Paul's life takes an interesting turn... [Vonnegut] now leads his protagonist down the darker paths of the human psyche: Paul's forsed conscription as a head of a rebel movement; the revelation of Paul's own deep-seated resentments agains his father and his resultant prejudice toward the society his father had helped to create; and, finally, his realisation that the rebels he has joined with are motivated to act not out of social consciousness or altruism, but out of mere vengeance and, vorse, boredom.
Though human beings in the novel are not portrayed as altogether lacking in will--an idea that grows more and more pronounced in Vonnegut's fiction over the years--they are nevertheless seen as the products of dark inner forces, inner machines, as it were, that impel them to act and to believe they do so only by choice.

35
Placed within the familiar generic context, Vonnegut's version of the future as political nightmare would seem the weakest of the well-known dystopian visions, the most ambiguous in terms of what the protagonist wants out of life and what he dislikes about the society in which he holds so high place... Paul is like a person who, after reading a historical fiction, wistfully longs to have lived at an earlier time, a more exciting and tumultuous period, anything other than the boring present. This, so to speak, "literary bias" is further suggested by Vonnegut's allusions to the conventional myths of the golden age and Judgement Day.

36
[The old player piano in the bar] is, of course, the central symbol in the novel of a society whose fundamental human activities, including the arts, have been taken over by machines and is, therefore, bled dry of all human feelings. The piano, the narrator ruefully observes, delivers "exactly five cents worth of joy."
The real catalyst for change in Paul... [is] the Reverned James J. Lasher [claiming to be antropologist and chaplain]... As it turns out, Lasher's suggestion here that religion, far from being central in most people's lives, is really an embellishment, a means of spirituality complementing a life worth living materially, is quite sighnificant, for his bitterness over that realization will motivate him to attempt to reverse matters... He wants to elevate someone to "Messiah" status, someone who will lead the disaffected workers politically and spiritually back to the (37) dignity they once enjoyed.

38
It is not wery difficult for the reader to discern what paul is trying to do, even though he himself seems unaware of the familiar contours of his plan. As Kathryn Hume correctly observes, Vonnegut's characters are continually in search of meaning in a shifting and bewildering universe... Subconsciously, this is precisely what Paul attempts to do: he makes a bulwark against the instability he feels, and he makes it out of culturally inherited materials. This inheritance is doubly significant in American fiction, for it includes suggestions of both the myth of Eden itself and the concept of American Eden... Paul wants to experience the "Earth as God had given it to man"... Farming becomes to him "a magic word," the dilapidated farm, devoid of all modern conveniences, becomes to him "irresistible," and his saccarine, social-climbing wife, he imagines, will be "enchanted, stunned, even, by this completely authentic microcosm of the path." She will not be, of course, but then again, Paul is nt thinking about Anita as she is any more than he is thinking about the world as it is. Rather, so desperately does he want to escape into the timeless innocence of the Edenic world that he constructs for himself an elaborate fiction about his wife, about the farm, about himself, even about the time itself.

39
The failure of Paul's social experiment with mythic forms marks a sharp turning point in the novel with the regard to genre... Vonnegut now moves in another direction, probing the reasons of human discontent itself.

41
As John Somer notes, paul learns little beyond the fact that people need to believe in something, and if that is all that harsh experience has taught him, it is a shallow lesson and one that is bound to provoke the reader's disappointment is Paul.
Indeed, by the novel's end, that disappointment is extended to the humanity in general--the machine elite and the rebellious have-nots. We watch the absurdly uniformed rebels let loose (42) all their basic urges, wantonly destroying all machinery, the useful and the "antagonistic," and then, virtually without a pause, they proceed to replace machinery, in effect, to rebuild the society they had so wanted to tear down.

42
[The] destruction of sewage-disposal machines along with any other machine they locate shows that their ill-planned rebellion was Saturnalian rather than political, childish without the serious dimension that lasher earlier used to justify their childishness. And so, after the fun of destroying things is over, they quite naturally move back to normal order of affairs--mechanizing tasks, putting things together, subscribing fully to the notion of technological progress.

43
The ending--told, significantly, entirely from Paul's poin of view--sums up the motives for action in the novel; and none of them are good, clean, altruistic, or humanitarian motives.
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Ultimately, then, technology and the political oppression that can result from its inhumane aplications are no the point of Player Piano except in a highly superficial sense... (44) Instead, it is an analysis of the human psyche, an exploration of the human urge to envision and create utopias... Machines have not imprisoned the people of Illium; their own humanity has, and even if they had managed to dismantle completely the current technocracy, Vonnegut suggests they would only be making way for another group of engineers with their own technologies and utopian schemes to work out... human dynamics create discontent be their very nature.