"the man had been desperately unhappy then. Now he was proud and smiling becasue his hands were busy doing what they liked to do best, Pail supposed- replacing men like himself with machines. He hooked up the lamp behind the Orange-O sign." (338)

This quote from Player Piano could be the authors feelings on human nature. Finnerty and Paul finally succeeded in overcoming this world built of machines, and here are the people trying to start from scratch in building up the same society. On the surface, it just looks like the man was fixing a machine. However this man had designed a machine to take over his place and it did just that! It took over his role in society. And instead of despising the machines he is drawn to his machine like instincts of making them. This scene in the book is a bit degrading to human nature as a whole. Its message is that human beings are so naive and unintelligent to fully grasp what Paul and Finnerty's grounds were for the uproar. He was acting as a machine, seeing something was broken, and the only processing he took was to rush to it and fix it. This is a common theme in this book, comparing men to machines. It also is comments on how the human race is so reliant on machines as a whole for survival.

Player Piano was not one of my favorites, however I did enjoy the overall message of the book. I think in a lot of instances machines are taking over way to much of what should be left for humans to do. Now-a-days a musician can simply sing a song and then have a computer make the background melody. Music in the present is slowly being stripped away of pure talent. A computer can also make a terrible musicians voice sounds harmonic and distinct. It is so incredibly disappointing to go to a concert and have the musician sound completely different from what he or she's recorded music sounds like.
I enjoyed the ending to Player Piano as well. Just because one can not win every battle does not mean it is not worth putting up a fight. I thought it was brilliant that in the end Lasher told them all he knew they would not win the "battle". In a book about a society that is so structured, the message at the ending of the book was winning a battle in itself. At least they finally had a cause for something, used their own brain power instead of the machine.

player piano

Throughout the entire book of Player Piano, I had been thinking about the title and it was significant to the work as a whole. In the first few chapters there is a player piano in the bar that Paul goes to with Finnerty. The word choice in this particular section is interesting because the author states that its a player piano, not just a regular piano. "Finnerty sat at the player piano, savagely improvising on the brassy, dissonant antique". (105) An original piano is a "machine", however this machine would be merely a pretty piece of wood if there were not a talented musician to play it. However a player piano is a machine that plays itself, stripping away any of the talent and human aspect from the music. Vonnegut uses the player piano as a symbol of machines taking over too much of what should remain human in society.