Corporate Life vs. Human Connection Theme Analysis

In Player Piano, a dedication to business and corporate life often keeps people from genuinely connecting with one another. Paul experiences this firsthand, since everyone around him in Ilium only seems to care about things like productivity or career advancement. But because Paul isn’t particularly interested in these things, he doesn’t have many people he can relate to. Even his wife, Anita, cares more about whether or not he lands a big promotion than about their actual relationship, as made clear by the fact that she leaves him as soon as he falls out of his company’s good graces. His old friend Finnerty is one of the only people Paul can actually connect with, but this is because Finnerty himself shares his jaded attitude toward the corporate world. By highlighting the way people in Paul’s life fixate on upward mobility and success, the novel presents a cynical view of corporate life, implying that it can overshadow more important things—like, for instance, building and maintaining strong personal relationships. 

Paul has a hard time finding happiness in his job because he doesn’t see the point of prioritizing work over everything else in life. In contrast, all of his colleagues are seemingly willing to fully devote themselves to work and the company as a whole. But Paul lacks “the ability to be moved emotionally, almost like a lover, by the […] the corporate personality.” To Paul, his job is just that: a job. People like his father, on the other hand, gave themselves entirely to the company, and though Paul is perfectly capable of carrying out the tasks required of him, he doesn’t have “what made his father aggressive and great: the capacity to really give a damn.” He simply can’t bring himself to care that much about his job.

Instead, Paul seeks out human connection, investing himself not in the company he works for, but in his personal relationships. For example, instead of training for the competitions that will take place at the Meadows (a corporate retreat), he decides to take Anita on a romantic evening to celebrate the anniversary of their wedding engagement. However, Anita doesn’t have the same priorities as Paul; whereas Paul cares more about their romantic bond, all Anita thinks about is making sure Paul succeeds in his career. For this reason, she tries to convince him to skip their anniversary, wanting him to rest up so that he’ll be able to prove himself a worthy competitor at the Meadows—a good illustration of how she’d rather Paul focus on improving his status at the company than on strengthening their relationship. In keeping with this, she leaves Paul as soon as she finds out that he has been fired, announcing her intention to marry Shepherd, who is just as preoccupied with corporate success as she is. 

On a broader level, the novel shows corporate life to be emotionally shallow and surprisingly lonely. Finnerty comments on this in a conversation with Paul, saying that it was the deep sense of loneliness that led him to quit his high-powered job in Washington, D.C. He says that he was “crazy with loneliness” back when he had his old job in Ilium, but he assumed that his promotion to the Washington job would help him find people he “admired.” Instead, he got to Washington and found nothing but “stupid, arrogant, self-congratulatory, unimaginative, humorless men.” All of these adjectives hint at the kind of traits that come along with what the book calls the “corporate personality”—a personality based on little more than an unquestioning dedication to a company and the pursuit of a successful career.

To that end, Paul and Finnerty have trouble establishing meaningful relationships in the workplace because most of their coworkers only think about the company and their own careers. This is why everyone immediately turns their back on Paul when Kroner and Gelhorne spread the rumor that he has been fired for collaborating with anti-automation revolutionaries. Within the course of a single day, he goes from being one of the most widely respected people at the company to a complete outcast, illustrating just how much his status dictates the way others treat him in the corporate world.

The fact that Paul’s coworkers collectively disown him also sheds light on the company’s strangely cultish environment, since everyone immediately bands together to turn against him. Out of everyone at the Meadows, only Ed Harrison—a young engineer Paul sits next to at dinner one night—shows him anything in the way of compassion. While everyone else keeps their distance from him once he’s been fired, Harrison brings Paul a whiskey and asks what he did to deserve such harsh treatment. This might seem unremarkable, but it’s actually a significant display of empathy, since the expectation at the company is that everyone should disassociate themselves from Paul. Harrison, though, cares more about reaching out to Paul on a personal level than he cares about his own career. This gesture thus serves as an example of how people can keep the corporate world from overshadowing their compassion for others. The first step, it seems, is simply trying to be a good person over trying to be a good employee—something that is unfortunately rare in this corporate environment that unquestioningly ostracizes Paul.