Mechanization of Human Life in Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano

Abstract

The recently departed Kurt Vonnegut Jr. presents his earliest novel Player Piano to the America of 1952, forecasting its coming age of electronics. The novel which is considered in the views of most post-modern critics, the brilliant social critique of a technologically-dominated society, expressing the fear of changing the human life into inhuman mechanical miserable one; the machines are controlling everything in the world, making the human useless and helpless.The present study is divided into three sections and a conclusion. Section one presents literary and historical background to the novel, examining its symbolic title. Section two explores the ills of technology: loneliness and idleness that clutch the modern man making his life like player piano. The solutions which are presented to the problems in times of peace are examined in section three, as an attempt to create new Utopia or find some hope. Finally, the conclusion which sums up the findings of the study.