Player Piano Study Guide

The youngest of three siblings, Kurt Vonnegut grew up in Indianapolis and went on to attend Cornell University. He studied biochemistry for just two years before dropping out in 1942, at which point he joined the Army and was trained as a mechanical engineer. In 1944, shortly after his mother took her own life, Vonnegut was sent abroad to fight in World War II. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge and was captured by German soldiers, who took him to a prison camp in Dresden. During the allied bombings of Dresden, Vonnegut survived by hiding underground in the meat locker of a slaughterhouse—an experience that informed his most famous novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut escaped Germany and returned to the United States in 1945, marrying his high school girlfriend, Jane Marie Cox, soon after he came home. They had three children while Vonnegut supported his fledgling writing career by working various jobs. He published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952, after working for General Electric for several years (the novel was partially inspired by his experience at this job). This was the beginning of a fruitful career, as Vonnegut published 13 other novels and multiple short story collections, plays, and essays. His final novel appeared in 1997, ten years before he died at the age of 84, having sustained head injuries after a fall.

Player Piano imagines a society in which an extreme form of automatization has taken place. This builds on the same ideas that drove the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, in which the invention of new machines increased production and streamlined efficiency in the workplace. The First Industrial Revolution (which spanned roughly from 1760 to 1840) introduced machines that made it easier for laborers to quickly complete various tasks. Things like the power loom and the steam engine, for instance, took pressure off of manual labors by limiting the amount of physical effort required to do their jobs.  The Second Industrial Revolution (1870-1914) built upon this progress, especially since the use of electrical power in factories became widespread, further diminishing the amount of work necessary to manufacture certain products. Player Piano pushes all of these strides to the extreme, imagining a world in which machines have completely replaced any kind of grunt work. It also plays on the fact that war often leads to vast changes, since the war in the novel is what leads to such widespread mechanization. Similarly, the American workforce drastically changed during World War II, when women started working in large numbers for the first time. The difference, of course, is that the inclusion of women in the workplace was an undoubtedly positive development, whereas the machines in Player Piano end up creating a divided, dystopian society.

In many ways, Player Piano set the tone for Vonnegut’s entire career, debuting not only his humor, but also his slightly cynical outlook on the world. He was often interested in examining class divides, as is the case not only in Player Piano, but also in his novels God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and The Sirens of Titan, both of which question whether or not wealth actually leads to happiness. Vonnegut was also strongly influenced by George Orwell, who was his favorite author; he even said that Orwell’s 1984 directly inspired Player Piano, as did Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Like Player Piano, these novels imagine dystopian futures that feel disconcertingly familiar. In terms of Player Piano’s humor and parody of corporate life, it makes sense to consider it alongside Herman Melville’s Bartleby, The Scrivener, a story in which the protagonist defies his boss’s requests by repeatedly saying, “I would prefer not to.” The novel’s cartoonish depiction of a ridiculous system of government also recalls Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22, which shows the absurdities of military life. And, in more recent times, the author George Saunders has often been compared to Kurt Vonnegut, since he—like Vonnegut—writes stories set in strange but believable alternate realities.