Player Piano: Foil 2 key examples

Ever the aggressive, demanding climber, Anita pushes her husband to enter the corporate fray. As a Lady Macbeth-like figure, she writes conversation outlines and drills talking points into Paul, so obsessed with career advancement that his corporate rank seems to matter more than his love. In fact, she approaches their relationship with anything but affection—hence Ed Finnerty’s nickname for her of “stainless steel.” Paul sustains a childless, one-sided marriage for most of the novel as he puts up with his wife's nagging insistence on the Pittsburgh job. Paul’s dream of a life on a quaint homestead is fundamentally at odds with Anita's fixation on respectability and appearances.

Ironically enough, the couple’s goals belie their divergent upbringings. Paul—who revolts against the system—happens to be the son of Doctor George Proteus, the revered genius who transformed the face of American industry and whose position rivaled that of the U.S. presidency. Meanwhile, Anita lacks a college education and grew up across the river but scorns her own people. “Just because they were born in the same part of the world as I was, that doesn’t mean I have to come down here and wallow with them,” she tells Paul as they cross into the working people’s side of the river.

All too predictably, the relationship that seemed fated to failure falls through. Paul and Anita break up in dramatic, spectacularly fitting fashion: Anita cheats on him with none other than his arch-rival, Lawson Shepherd.

Finnerty is as stubbornly non-conforming as he is talented beyond measure. He can “sense the basic principles and motives of almost any human work, not just engineering.” But he also plays with shotguns, frequents bars across the river, and could not care less about his own self-appearance. “Finnerty had always been shockingly lax about his grooming, and some of his more fastidious supervisors in the old days had found it hard to believe that a man could be so staggeringly competent, and at the same time so unsanitary-looking,” Paul thinks to himself. He abandons the engineers at the Meadows and takes up with Lasher, pledging himself to the overthrow of the machinery. “My sympathy’s with any man up against a machine,” he smirks when Fred Berringer’s Checker Charley machine combusts.

Player Piano makes this sulking outcast the mirror opposite of Lawson Shepherd, who slanders Paul behind his back and plots his rival’s downfall. Lacking the basic grace to accept Paul’s forgiveness, he seemingly puts pettiness in human form. He snitches on Paul for letting Finnerty onto Ilium Works’s premises without authorization and repeatedly rats out his superior. Finnerty draws Paul toward the Ghost Shirt Society with his allure of revolt, but Shepherd tugs him back into the boardrooms with his slavish desire to impress. In a novel that explores the tyranny of social structures, its two characters stand at the opposite poles of revolution and establishment.