Research Paper on:
Kurt Vonnegut's The Player Piano

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
off the pages were shrugged away as things that simply could not happen, but things that certainly made a story interesting and worth reading. In his book, however, Vonnegut proved  to be more of a prophet than he, himself, likely would have guessed. The purpose of this paper is to answer the  following questions that pertain to Player Piano. First, was Vonnegut prophetic with his book -- and will America become the type of nation that is envisioned in the novel? Second,  what is the theme of the novel and how does it relate to the life of the books hero, Paul Proteus? And third, how might American politics either lead to  or prevent the type of futuristic society that Vonnegut describes in his book? Before attempting to answer the above questions, well discuss  what the book is about. Player Piano, Vonneguts first novel, was set in what was then the present (the years immediately following "the war," which one can take to mean  World War II, given the particular time frame). America had been victorious in this war. The war, however, wasnt won by men, but rather, by machines and Americas engineering capabilities  and technological know-how. Because the production lines were very efficient and cranked out high-quality goods on a regular and predictable basis, they required no human supervision -- so while the  factories ran on machines, with only a handful of humans guiding the controls to ensure that the machines would keep running, most of the men were away at the front,  fighting the war. Ten years later, however, the world has changed, and machines have taken over. Humans are divided into two classes;