The Day Sisyphus Escaped the Assembly Line
The short story “The Sandwich Factory” is written by Jason Kennedy in 2007 and tells the story of a male individual’s time at a sandwich factory in 1994. We hear of the narrator’s low-paid, meaningless job where mechanization has made the workers’ task subordinate and absurd. He works at a conveyor belt that spits out two loafs of bread. The mission of the employers is then to place ingredients in the sandwiches while the product is moving past them. They even rank the different ingredients; “…if you were unlucky or new, it would be tomatoes.” (l. 48, p. 3) Their large attention on such a small subject illustrates the extreme relativism that characterizes the story.
We follow an unnamed 1st person narrator, and the story is told through his point of view. We only know that he is a man because someone at the factory wants him to find a female partner (l.93, p. 4). The language of the short story is characterized by a lot of humor and irony, for example the description of Dot, who would have been an excellent pirate, giving both blowjobs and sandwiches to the seagulks (l. 36, p. 3). The character Dot has, like many of the other workers, lost her soul by the monotonous work at the factory and she is now giving blowjobs to strangers at the local nightclub. We also hear of another co-worker who looks afraid every time he interacts with our narrator (l. 42, p. 3) - he is not used to human contact and is alienated from his colleagues. The narrator has not turned completely into a zombie yet and still contains some human characteristics - for example his shyness with women. In addition his cultural flavor has not been erased: he listens to Joy Division, a former post-punk band whose lead singer committed suicide, he reads Camus and a Japanese novel from the 1940’s. His cultural flavor seems avant-garde and very intellectual which contrasts to his very mechanic job. We do not expect many assembly line workers to read
French philosophy. He likes fine-culture but has a job that requires zero intelligence. This makes an ironical unbalance in the life of the narrator. An intellectual would not stay at a job that “most people left before they made it through a week” (l. 94, p. 4). He has to choose - will he continue his transformation into just another factory zombie?
The managers of the factory are described as coldhearted, as our narrator imagines them saying: “Make sure he doesn’t stagger into a machine and kill himself. We don’t need a lawsuit.” (l. 124, p. 5). Their primary task is not to make good sandwiches but to never look surprised or confused in any situation, and they even lock up the workers to gain a higher rate of productivity (l. 66, p. 3). Through this irony we hear that managers really are the extended arms of capitalism - evildoers. But the short story is not a social realistic critique of the modern society and its hierarchal structures: We do not hear of destitution, exploitation and misery but get a humorous view into a boring reality at a factory. But at the same time the short story criticizes many aspects of the modern ways of production: The monotonous methods and the heartless bosses. This view on the modern society is the same as in Chaplin’s “Modern Times”, as portrayed in the still picture from the film. Chaplin sits on top of a gear, the symbol of industrialization. How can the little man, our narrator/Chaplin, grasp the modern world? Industrialization has made new ground settings for mankind, and we have to reinvent the meaning in life - if there has ever been a meaning. How do we build up a proper life in the industrialized society with all its facets and can we overcome the meaningless of modern life?
The narrator describes the myth of Sisyphus several times in the short story, and points out that the sandwich workers would rather roll the boulder up the mountain than doing their job. (l. 58, p.3) The worker at the factory has an even worse situation than Sisyphus in the Greek myth.
Camus, the author our narrator is reading, touched the myth of Sisyphus in one of his books. He described how human nature was affected by the fact, that life was meaningless. Life lost it deeper meaning when the great narratives died and when The Industrial Revolution kicked in. When man lost the faith in God and the ideologies they also realized that life itself is filled with absurdity. We lost meaning. But it is not until you get conscious of the absurdity of your own life situation, that you will see your life as meaningless and absurd. Your life can be trivial and monotonous but you can easily fill it with meaning and keep yourself busy, even though, there is no greater truth or narrative. Camus puts it: "The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious."1
The short story is the tale of a workman becoming conscious of some of life’s absurdity. His colleagues, those who stay for over a week, do not realize their hollow situation. They are all trapped in their monotonous lives. In the text “Nice Work” by David Lodge we hear of an intellectual visitor at a factory. A director tells this person from ‘the outside’ that the workers enjoy their work. That it gives them time to daydream and switch off. And as the manager puts it: “If they were smart enough to get bored, they wouldn’t be doing a job like this.” (l. 15, p. 7) The manager does not understand how boring it is to stand at the assembly line, but he has a point similar to the one in the short story. The ordinary worker, both in the short story and in the Lodge text, accepts his situation and his job because he is not aware of the absurdity.
If you only know the prison walls why would you then escape? This is also Camus’ final conclusion: Sisyphus must be happy. One must become conscious of one’s tragedy before wanting to break out.
But how do we then react to this absurdity when we realize it? Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division escaped life through suicide, a solution the existential philosophers rejected.2 Even though it is your ultimate fate to die, you can create meaning in your life. The narrator of the short story escapes the factory in the end because he does not want to end like a mechanized factory dweller. We do not hear about his further life, but we are sure, that he ended up a better place. He breaks free of the trivial life by leaving the factory. He needs to because of the consciousness gained.
The imagery of Dickens’ “Hard Times”
Dickens uses figurative speech to create an image of a terrible industrialized town. He makes use of nouns with negative connotations to substantiate his point; the town is filled with smoke, ashes, machinery and even smoke that look like serpents. A serpent is usually a symbol of evil associated with poison and death.
He uses another animal metaphor in his description; “steam engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in state of melancholy madness” and compares the look of the town with a savage (l. 3). It is ironic that he uses elements from nature to describe the unnatural, deceased town. In this metaphor he implies that the town is monotonous and mechanic, exemplified by steam machinery and the assembly lines. We get the picture of an ugly and impersonal place, where all people have become alike and tedious. A place “where all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the pavements” (l. 10).
All these metaphors create a dark atmosphere and we can almost imagine how awful it must be to work in the factory halls of Coketown. “Coke” is a byproduct from coal and a main source in the pollution of the air.
Coke and coal is the fuel of the town, the fuel and the root of the Industrial Revolution which has created this new polluted and ugly town. This little text can therefore be seen as a critique of industrialization and its consequences. Gone is the rural beauty, now replaced by the smoke filled, urban ugliness. The inhabitants are all alike, alienated by the new society.