The sandwich factory
In the short-story The Sandwich Factory by Jason Kennedy, we are shown the negative sides of the work in a factory. We get an insight through an unnamed narrator. The narrator works, obviously, at a sandwich factory. The theme of the story is very vague, if existing at all. What might be a clue to the theme is that the work that is being done at the factory is something a machine easily could do, so something with the view of factory workers.
It isn’t really the best job he could think of, but after being fired from the last one, he takes the job at the factory even though the pay is bad. The narrator seems like a rather intelligent person in contradiction to the ones you find at factories; he listens to Joy Division and read novels originally written in Japan, which tells me that he is too clever to be fit for the monotonous work the factory provides him with. This certainly isn’t his goal in life. As the story is told from the eyes of the narrator, it is also tainted with his views and thoughts. We know the narrator is a man as he says, “I had zero confidence with women anyway” in line 96, and the elderly lady at the factory, Dot wishes to find a girl for him amongst the female workers. Again we see the narrator differing from the rest of the workers, as he allows himself to be shy towards girls instead of looking down their tops (lines 109-110 ). He is more humane. I think we are given a picture of what happens if you should happen to stay in the factory for too long. Here, I’m referring to the flailing madman. On a side note it might be worth to notice that the madman is a forklift-driver(they are highly respected and awed by the workers) and that being this probably will make you insane. This is understandable, though seeing as the workers are being treated as mindless slaves. Just thinking the managers would lock up the workers -and thereby taking them hostage- is wrong. Not to forget the dividing between the workers the managers make, for example one chooses the best by how their legs look like. This unfair behaviour makes the narrator fantasising of how he would treat the managers if he once came to power(lines 59-65).
The piece of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, suits very much how the factory must look like to an outsider and how workers are treated and their response. These people are easily compared to robots as we get the feeling they have absolutely no emotions at all, “and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow”. Despite the fact that we would demand a sterile environment of those who produce our sandwiches, the town pictured in the novel is very alike the factory described by the narrator. We hear of no one complaining, they just accept their fate and adjust to it, “There were three ways to respond to being locked in. Firstly, no response, keep working at the same rate. Or start working faster, so the work would finish sooner and the doors would reopen. Finally, accept that you were here till the end and slow down, collecting more pay”. We get a somewhat likely result when comparing the short-story with the piece of David Lodge’s novel Nice work. Here the workers respond like machines too, but with the difference that they actually think in comparison to those in Hard times. The manager, Victor Wilcox, explains that he only treat the workers the way he do because the workers get to daydream instead of focusing on changing tasks and that’s the best way to do it. Robyn doesn’t understand this, but as Vic also notices in the last line of the text, she is too smart to see why they aren’t bored, she is too feminine. This also tell us that not only is the narrator too smart for his job, he is also too feminine, he wants diversity in the day.
The last line in the story, “When I had recovered, I drove home and I never went back” along with the conclusion above, tell us what might be the theme of the story; the narrator don’t like the job –he only took it because it was available. The job isn’t satisfying his intellect and it disturbs him that he can’t know for sure what to expect of his work tomorrow. Unlike Dot and Madman, he got away while he still had a chance (insert omnious theme).