The Sandwich Factory By Jason Kennedy The main theme of the short story The Sandwich Factory is the mechanization of human beings. The plot takes place in 1994 at a sandwich factory and we meet the narrator who works there. Through him we get the impression that the employees are no longer considered humans or individuals, but just one of many.The factory threatens to turn human beings into machines by thwarting the development of their emotions and imaginations and in the end of the story the narrator realizes that he doesn’t want to be a part of the factory. The narrator in this short story is a 1 st person narrator who restricts his own view to the factory.
It is important to remember that we hear his thoughts and his opinion, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is all true and he may seem unreliable – for example in some of his descriptions of the other characters.But one thing is to be sure of, and that is irrespective of whether he is reliable or not, the theme of the short story is still to be found. The narrator mentions his Joy Division records, his Camuls novels and the novel Confessions of a Mark and this indicates that he is a smart and intelligent person and in addition it also indicates that he probably is a student who has taken a low-paid job to make some money.The narrator is a man and this is based on the fact that it says in the text that he has no confidence with women but there is furthermore a quotation that establishes that the narrator is a man: “Dot wanted someone to have sex with me (…) Dot was concerned that I did not say much, that I didn’t try to “get into the girls’ knickers” and she searched for a girl who would sleep with me.
I had zero confidence with women anyway…”1 Furthermore the passage also indicates that the narrator is different than the other employees in the sense that he has not yet been totally mechanized because he shows human emotions such as being shy about women and not being confident. Through the narrator we get a very negative impression of the factory. The factory itself seems like a ‘typical’ factory where the employees sit at the conveyor belt day after day, doing the same thing. This monotonous type of work is sure to affect a person at some point, for example Dot, who is a contrast to the narrator.Dot has been at the factory long enough to have lost a great part of her identity and human qualities.
She has become a victim of the factory and this assertion is based on the fact that she involves in the narrator’s life when she tries to be a matchmaker because she doesn’t understand why the narrator is not acting like the other workers. Being denied the right to have human needs is sure to drive a person crazy at some point. The mad kid is a perfect example of the human mechanization at the factory. “I worked at a sandwich factory where a mad kid worked.
1Lines 93-96. Side 1 af 3 Studieportalen. dk He would leer through a hatch and wave a knife at me. ”2 Madman emphasizes the madness at the factory and he has become a ‘product’ of it. The managers of the factory don’t respect the workers and it seems like they treat them like robots that work monotonously by the conveyor belt. “Locked doors were a feature of the sandwich factory.
The managers would lock everyone in if we were behind schedule or there was a larger order than usual. ”3 The employees have nothing to say and it seems like they are being treated like slaves.The managers also divide the workers in groups and mark them as the ‘good’ ones and the ‘poor ‘ones and it emphasizes that the workers are not treated like individuals. The narrator gets affected by the manager’s harsh treatment of the workers. “I entertained a vision of one day being rich and hiring a bunch of faded paunchy managers (…) I’d yell in the megaphone…”4 He begins to imagine himself being rich and being in charge some day and loves the thought of being the boss and treat the managers the same way they treat him and the workers.
The managers treat the workers in the factory as emotionless objects that are easily exploited for their own self-interest. An example of that is in the end of the story when the narrator faints by the conveyor belt and where he imagines a manager saying: “Make sure he doesn’t stagger into a machine and kill himself. We don’t need a lawsuit. ”5 This indicates as I mentioned before that the managers only think about themselves and don’t treat the employees as human beings and this becomes the last straw for the narrator.
He is lucky to escape and avoid ending up like Dot and Madman.The chosen theme from my interpretation above can be put into perspective with Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times where he exposes Coketown to stand for the negative aspects of industrialism and the mechanization of human beings. In the description we see the monotonous work with the same work, pavements, hours etc. which results in mechanization of the workers and sometimes madness like in The Sandwich Factory where each person’s identity are destroyed. The picture Relativity from 1953 is also a very good example of how a factory can be.
