Player Piano

“Please, this average man, there is no equivalent in our language, I’m afraid.”

The interpreter explains this to Halyard. Throughout the journey of the Shah, he has a difficult time resolving the differences in how things are named. For the Shah, what the U.S. calls the average citizen, they call a slave. 

“Makes you feel kind of creepy, don’t it, Doctor, watching them keys go up and down? You can almost see a ghost sitting there playing his heart out.”

Rudy Hertz says this to Paul. This is perhaps the most important quote in the novel, as it contains the metaphorical depth of the whole premise. The world runs itself in Vonnegut’s book;the unseen hands are those that have built and maintained the machines. 

“[…] [H]er strength and poise were no more than a mirror image of his own importance, an image of the power and self-satisfaction the manager of Ilium Works could have, if he wanted it.”

Paul thinks this about Anita, who lacks any real agency throughout the novel. Her agency is directly proportional to her husband’s, and, later, to Shepherd’s. The single time Paul offers her a chance at agency, she turns it down. 

“It was an appalling thought, to be so well-integrated into the machinery of society and history as to be able to move in only one plane, and along one line.”

Humanity’s lack of options about the course of their lives is a theme of the novel. Perhaps, as the quote suggests, humanity itself is one big machine that moves along a measurable field that’s as inescapable as history.

“My sympathy’s with any man up against a machine, especially a machine backing up a knucklehead like you against a man like Paul.”

Here, Finnerty roots for Paul to beat the checkers-playing machine. For Finnerty, humankind still holds more interest, more hope, than does the machine. Humanity is a thing to be believed in, even if it’s anunderdog in the narrative world Vonnegut creates. 

“It would be easier to move the Himalayas than to change the Army.”

Amidst all the changes that have taken place in the United States in the novel, one thing seems not to have changed—the military. The Shah points this fact out, and finds it curious that the army, too, has not evolved in any way. 

“He knew with all his heart that the human situation was a frightful botch, but it was such a logical, intelligently arrived-at botch that he couldn’t see how history could possibly have led anywhere else.”

It’s difficulty to see any other way of being than the one lived in currently, and Paul, too, struggles to think of the possibilities had the machines’ dominance not taken place. This question will be returned to at the end of the novel, when Paul realizes that a middle groundwas possible, and best. 

“People in his land sleep with smart women and make good brains cheap. Save enough wire to go to moon a thousand times.”

The Shah laughs at the American’s wire system for their supercomputer. He understands that on a basic level intelligence can be cultivated in a variety of ways, and that intelligence does not just mean quantitative ability. 

“This is meat for the spirit. This can pull me out of a slump like nothing I can think of.”

Kroner says this about the record player, which is ironic because Kroner is one of the biggest proponents of the mechanized world. For him to find solace and strength in the antique is the exact opposite of what one would expect in him.

“Why don’t they build a gimmick that will give a man a free drink before he gets the ax?”

Paul sees the rightness of the machines’ decision to fire his friend, but the way they go about strips the humanity from him. They don’t thank him for his work, or even give him a pat on the back. That’s what’s missing in his world. 

“This pipsqueak of a man in a pipsqueak job had pipsqueak standards he was willing to lay his pipsqueak life down for.”

Paul says this about the real estate agent. He notices that the people that operate in the mechanized system do have standards, but they are small ones, in comparison to the rebels.

“I’m no good to anybody, not in this world.”

This sums up the general feeling of the people living in Homestead, and why they feel the need to rebel against Ilium. They are unemployed and exist largely without hope or purpose.

“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.”

Anita, when confronted with her own origins, feels no affinity for the people in Homestead. She’s moved beyond that strata. Her tireless social climbing, however, shows how much seeing these people really scares her. 

“Darling, when I see what we’ve got, and then see what these people have got, I feel like a horse’s ass.”

This is the basic premise for Paul’s change of heart. He tries to convince Anita, but she’s abandoned empathy for the lower class, in favor of a better way of life. 

“God knows it’d be easy enough to stick with the system, and keep going right on up. It’s getting out that takes nerve.”

The system was created so that the easiest choice is to stay within it. The possibility of moving outside of it is supposed to seem impossible. This is not so different, one could contend, from the mechanized, corporate capitalism much of the world embraces today.

“It does seem like the machines took all the good jobs, where a man could be true to hisself and false to nobody else, and left all the silly ones.”

The barber speaks off-the-cuff about the machines to the Shah, who can’t understand him. The barber represents the fear and frustration of the general worker with this new way of life and worries about when machines will replace even barbers.

“Culture’s so cheap, a man figured he could insulate his house cheaper with books and prints than he could with rockwool.”

The only thing of value in this system is that which serves to support or make the system stronger. Literature and art seem frivolous to the computers, who themselves are on the verge of replacing artists. 

“In that life, believe me, the thoughtful, the sensitive, those who can recognize the ridiculous, die a thousand deaths.”

Ed Harrison says this about the life that he gave up, a life spent working at Ilium. It’s not enough that one might realize the inhumanity of what’s happening, but, through realizing that, they are tortured further. Emotion and sensitivity are detractors in this mechanized world.

“The world should be restored to the people.”

The basic goal of the Ghost Shirt Society, this would prove to also be the problem for them. All they seem to have been able to plan was the destruction of the current way of life, as opposed to installing a new one.

“The machines are to practically everybody what the white men were to the Indians.”

The allusion is presented for the reader here. The novel itself can be read as futuristic allusion to the white man’s confrontation with the Native American—even the division of land and resources.

“You don’t matter…you belong to history now.”

Paul’s inability to have agency in the novel comes to an almost comedic head when he is taken by the Ghost Shirts. They don’t want him to do anything;they just plan to use his name to their benefit.

“For the first time in the whole of his orderly life he was sharing profound misfortune with another human being.”

When he’s tapping out his conversation to Garth, who was also arrested, Paul finds that he is able to have a real conversation full of empathy. The irony of this is that it is a moment where communication is separated by a wall and stripped down to a coded language, and effectively mechanized.

“What the hate does, I think, is to make me not only believe, but want to do something about the system.”

Paul’s confronted with the idea that he’s directing the hatred he has for this father at the system. Paul does not deny this and claims it’s exactly what makes him human.