Player Piano: Irony 8 key examples

Buck’s prediction is somewhat ironic—the manager who was just replaced by machines seems to cope with his frustration by betting that his colleague will suffer the same fate. More notably, though, his foreshadowing sets in motion a feeling of uncertainty. Bud anticipates the possibility of Paul’s replacement, a threat that recurs consistently in the novel. At the engineers’ party in Chapter 5, Checker Charley seems poised to topple Paul’s checker-playing dominance. In the office, Lawson Shepherd positions himself as a contender for the Pittsburgh position. If not tested by gadgets, Paul is challenged by those around him. Competition lurks around every corner.

The greater irony of Bud’s prediction lies in what it misses. Paul loses his job not to gadgets, but in one of the novel’s rare moments in which a character asserts their agency. Fed up with his stifled life as an engineer, he formally gives up his position and testifies as a member of the Ghost Shirt Society. Paul removes himself by his own volition rather than any impersonal technology, proving Bud wrong in the work’s very last moments.

In gesturing at Tarzan’s original author, Player Piano also imports Hagstrohm's famed fictional creation into its post-war America. Tarzan—the feral child who grows up in the African wilderness—captured popular imagination after the novel’s release. Among the cultural interpretations that he has since amassed, Tarzan emblematizes the complex relationship between humans and nature.

The irony, though, is that the reference is terribly misplaced. Tarzan’s connotations of nature and environmentalism sit awkwardly within the novel’s thicket of mass-produced, self-optimized concrete. The character named after Tarzan’s creator lives—of all places—in an M-17 house. Tarzan does battle against predators with his bare hands while Hagstrohm slouches before a TV. Edgar Hagstrohm’s America of “simplified planning and production” has left no place for forests, animals, or people.

Despite Anita’s joy, the scene telegraphs dramatic irony. “It was fantastic how well things were turning out,” Paul briefly congratulates himself—and misses the mark spectacularly. As Anita begins surveying the home, the reader clues in on the real reason for her delight. What Paul had initially interpreted as Anita’s genuine “contentment” only turns out to be a sense of speculative pleasure—she sees the house not as their future home, but a place to plunder or gut out with technological replacements. The clock can be outfitted with an “electric movement.” The dry sink should take the television set, and wide board floors can accommodate the rumpus room. Rattling off the list of potential upgrades with the clarity of an architect, Anita suggests to the reader what her joy-befuddled husband has not yet realized. Spending a life with Paul in this hundred-year-old home does not ever cross her consciousness, and he stumbles into a bitter surprise the moment he brings it up. “We’d die in six months,” she tells him—a rebuff that, after such a convincing appearance of pleasure, seems all the more devastating. Dramatic irony exposes the couple’s fundamentally incompatible priorities.

The dramatic irony presents a mix of comedy and fear. As Paul sits face to face before some of the most powerful executives in the country, the moment builds tension and plants an expectation of stunned outrage. Kroner knows of Paul’s night across the river and Finnerty’s unreported gun, after all. But either deliberately or not, the directors misinterpret Paul’s outburst as mere playacting. They applaud his enthusiasm and defang his frustration. What had been intended as a genuine surge of anger becomes a “wonderful” performance that meets a reception of friendly banalities. Kroner and MacCleary hardly even bother to face Paul’s anger—they merely pat him on the back.

Strangely enough, this warm reaction seems far more menacing than open confrontation. It speaks to the directors’ ability to gloss over uncomfortable truths and even reinterpret reality—they cast mass displacement as progress, disguise corporate infighting as friendly competition, and cloak class stratification as the fruits of democracy. This moment replaces violence with something arguably more terrifying—the power to sculpt reality to their own liking.

The sergeant’s desire to return to the battlefield is equally ironic as illogical. In a world where soldiers no longer need to put their lives on the line at the battlefield, the retired fighter dreams of ending his life in war. Faced with raised standards of living and all the modern comforts, he opts for danger if not death. He would rather end his life in the name of courage or glory than continue it in this impersonally streamlined reality.

Like Paul’s dream of the homestead, the sergeant’s longing joins the novel’s other romanticizations of the past—many of which may be far from perfect themselves. But this overwhelming desire and its irony speak to the idle discontent that so many in the novel’s post-war America experience. Pampered but also purposeless, the characters find themselves deprived of their humanity as machinery takes their places. Supercomputers can crunch the numbers, automated factories control the supply, and gadgets satisfy every need. The sense of total fulfillment and irrelevance that follows may well be the equivalent of death.

Dr. Harrison’s pithy insight brings to full view the warped logic of the novel’s mechanical reality. The suggestion—that those who compete with slaves become slaves themselves—strikes at the paradoxical heart of Paul’s dilemma. By toiling away for the humans, the post-war machines have ironically overtaken them as the ultimate masters. Cost-efficient, flawlessly executed labor does not mean mastery or a better life for its beneficiaries—it simply spells replacement. Time and again, the novel lingers over the despair of uselessness that makes labor seem like a blessing by comparison. Talented innovators like Bud can invent machines one day only to find themselves jobless the next. Otherwise promising car repairmen get trapped among the Reeks and Wrecks. In struggling against the mechanical slaves, those who defy the technological forces become something even less. Harrison’s cruel contradiction suggests that what had been designed to help only ends up hurting.

The moment of situational irony sees an arrogant man suddenly brought low. The “heavy, florid, urbane” gentleman who had previously ordered the rock throwers to move their “damned wheelbarrows” now returns to the city, sobered and sheepish. Having reaped the privilege of his education status for so long, he bears the brunt of his fabricated Cornell credentials. The doctor at the United States Department of State turns out to be no more than a charlatan.

But Halyard finds himself in good company amid Player Piano’s cast of characters. Fred Berringer—the son of a wealthy family of engineers—slips into Ilium Works’s elite circles despite falling short of its qualifications. Doctor Gelhorne—the National Industrial, Commercial, Communications, Foodstuffs, and Resource Director and Ilium’s most important man—holds no college degree at all. In the novel’s hyper-stratified society, Halyard is one among others who do not deserve their positions but have enjoyed their claims to power—however limited or uncertain they may be.

In railing against the “goddamned people” who always “[get] tangled up in the machinery,” Finnerty takes issue with the impulse toward improvement. Machines would have been perfect but for the people, who “[keep] things from staying the way they are.” Humans—in their restlessness and desires—ultimately ruin the things they create. If it isn’t broken, Finnerty seemingly suggests, don’t fix it.

The paradox and irony of this aphorism is that it is almost impossible to follow. The Ghost Shirt Society does not entirely freeze the pace of progress, either. In trying to reclaim a more distant past, Paul and Finnerty themselves disrupt the new order that has been created. Player Piano reveals a status quo of elite engineers and corporations that is no less static than the age Finnerty longs for. In their struggle for the “pursuit of happiness” and “sovereignty,” they also disturb the neat divisions of class and IQ that have acquired their own suffocating constancy. Ironically, preventing change is itself an effort to keep things from staying the way they are. Finnerty stumbles across the twisty truth that any human activity inevitably introduces change.