Player Piano: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

It’s not exactly clear what the “nameless, aching need” inside Paul actually is, other than a general desire to lead a more fulfilling life. What that life would actually look like, though, is unknown. He hoped Finnerty would help him forget about this feeling, but Finnerty did the exact opposite: he validated Paul’s unhappiness. Instead of helping his friend forget about his woes, Finnerty tried to get Paul to see that his unhappiness in the corporate world is completely understandable. However, Paul isn’t ready to accept this, which is why he now hopes he won’t see Finnerty for a while. In other words, Finnerty struck a nerve in Paul, but Paul isn’t ready to admit that he doesn’t like his current life. As a result, he wants to distance himself from Finnerty.

Again, Anita is more invested in Paul’s career than Paul himself. Rather than punishing Shepherd for going behind his back, Paul wants to treat him with kindness, suggesting that he cares more about treating people well than he cares about his own job. Shepherd and Anita, on the other hand, are more interested in status and power than human relationships.

Shepherd confirms in this moment that he wants the Pittsburgh job for himself. He wants it so badly, in fact, that he’s willing to go behind Paul’s back—even though Paul himself treats him with nothing but kindness. Although Paul takes this entire ordeal in stride, it’s a clear reminder that he exists in a cutthroat atmosphere, and this is one possible reason he’s so dissatisfied with his life as a manager.

At this point in the novel, Paul still seems to believe in the value of automation. However, the fact that the speech he gives is basically the same speech everyone gives when they talk about Ilium Works suggests that he’s not all that invested in these ideas. Although he might genuinely believe machines make better products than human laborers, he isn’t interested in this idea quite enough to come up with something original to say about it—in fact, he even admitted to Katharine that his point about the Industrial Revolution was borrowed from something a famous intellectual said many years ago. Simply put, he’s just going through the motions of corporate life, waxing poetic about the benefits of automation without really caring about his job as much as people like Kroner or Shepherd.

Kroner is so focused on the idea of productivity that he ends up tacitly endorsing the practice of slavery. He doesn’t acknowledge that slavery was a terrible thing that deprived Black people of basic human rights. Instead, he fixates on how much enslaved people accomplished as workers, inadvertently implying that he understands—on some level—why powerful white businessmen would have wanted to enslave people in the first place. Of course, his main point is that people can put machines to work without having to feel bad about treating them poorly, but he never explicitly says this—so his comment comes off as callous, as if all he cares about is productivity.

The First Industrial Revolution took place between 1760 and 1840. It was responsible for changing the manufacturing process, as new inventions made it easier (and faster) for workers to produce materials without expending large amounts of physical effort. The Second Industrial Revolution spanned from roughly 1870 to 1914 and largely built upon the progress of the First Industrial Revolution, using electrical power to make work even easier and faster. Paul’s general point is that, though it’s easy to measure how much physical work machines have spared human laborers, it’s harder to quantify the emotional burdens that automation has eased. The mere fact that he’s thinking about “annoyance” and “boredom” suggests that he’s attuned to the overall impact of mechanization on society, not just on the business-related effects of these machines. Kroner, on the other hand, only seems to care about productivity.

Baer’s point is that the “annoyance” and “boredom” people used to feel at work used to cause faults in the products. Paul himself made a similar point while talking to Katharine earlier in the day, saying that any minor problem—like a hangover or an argument with the boss—could easily affect a person’s work. Now, though, Paul is more interested in exploring how mechanization has impacted the people living in Homestead. The answer, of course, is that it has deprived them of jobs and generally made their lives worse, but nobody at the dinner wants to consider this—instead, they want to tell themselves that mechanization has led to a better world. It seems obvious that this isn’t true, since the people on the other side of the river don’t enjoy the same perks as managers and engineers. However, Kroner and everyone else at the dinner don’t recognize this because they don’t actually care about the people of Homestead—yet another sign of the stark class division that exists in Ilium.

Whereas Paul still passively believes in the value of automation, Finnerty has completely given up on trying to convince himself that the proliferation of machines in the workplace has led to a better world. In fact, he thinks there’s evidence that it has done the opposite, arguing that there are observable ways in which mechanization has harmed society. This, it seems, is the answer to Paul’s question about how technological advancement has impacted people on the other side of the river: it has led to things like addiction and suicide. Because everyone at the dinner except Finnerty still believes in the value of mechanization, though, nobody’s willing to objectively consider the negative effects of all this progress.

This checker game is a perfect representation of what has happened in this society: humans have been pitted against machines. Humans hardly stand a chance in the workforce, since machines are able to work more efficiently and with higher accuracy than most physical laborers. The difference here, though, is that checkers is a mental game, meaning that Paul faces the exact thing he told Katharine he fears: a future in which machines are better than humans at thinking.

Machines are perfectly capable of replacing physical laborers, but they’re clearly not yet advanced enough to render human thought obsolete. This is comforting to Paul and Finnerty, both of whom are skeptical about the impact machines have had on society as a whole. Everyone else, though, is deeply committed to the idea of technological progress, so Checker Charley’s fiery demise upsets them—after all, this outcome suggests that machines haven’t come quite as far as people like Kroner would like to think.

Checker Charley’s loose connection illustrates that even machines are bound to make mistakes. Ironically, Checker Charley would have been fine if only someone had fixed the connection. This shows that human error can still make its way into the world of machinery, but it also emphasizes the importance of human oversight—after all, machines like Checker Charley can’t fix themselves!

In this moment, Paul recognizes the absurdity of the corporate world, in which everyone is obsessed with productivity and the value of technological progress. The idea that Berringer and everyone else could be so upset about a malfunctioning machine emphasizes how obsessed they are with the promise of automation. Finnerty, on the other hand, recognizes that machines aren’t always something to celebrate (a viewpoint that Paul has apparently come to appreciate). On an even more basic level, Paul’s laughter suggests that he enjoys seeing his fellow managers and engineers get so flustered about something as ridiculous as a machine designed to play checkers. This, after all, is a good representation of how seriously Paul’s coworkers take the idea that machines have made the world a better place.