The Player Piano Symbol Analysis

The player piano—which sits in the bar Paul often visits in Homestead—symbolizes the strange connection that exists between humans and machines. Although machines have replaced so many people in the workforce, they wouldn’t even exist if humans hadn’t invented them—and since they were designed to recreate or emulate the movements of a skilled laborer, there’s actually something surprisingly human about the way they function. The player piano is a perfect representation of this, since it can play songs in the same way that a real, living musician once played them (in many cases, the songs in a player piano are re-creations of a live performance). Similarly, some of the machines at the Ilium Works were programmed to carry out the precise motions of a human laborer. Many years ago, for instance, Paul, Finnerty, and Shepherd recorded Rudy Hertz’s movements and designed a machine that could reproduce those movements over and over. Of course, the machine itself is completely nonhuman, but it wouldn’t function without the template of Rudy’s craftsmanship. In the same way, the player piano can play a song all by itself, but it can only do this because a human originally played that same song. This, then, embodies the strange fact that these machines wouldn’t exist in the first place without the very people they’ve replaced.