Mekanisk eksistens: Analyse af 'The Sandwich Factory'

Factories turn human beings into machines. This is the perspective of the narrator in the short story “The Sandwich Factory” by Jason Kennedy. When mechanization is utilized to increase efficiency, factory employees become monotone working machines and individuals become just one of many - a crowd of insignificant people.

This assignment will begin with an analysis and interpretation of the short story “The Sandwich Factory” by Jason Kennedy. To put the story into perspective the assignment includes a discussion of the text, “Nice work” by David Lodge and the picture, “Relativity” by M.C. Escher. The assignment ends with a short essay about the description of Coketown in Charles Dickens’ novel “Hard Times”.

A: The short story, “The Sandwich Factory” by Jason Kennedy from 2007 is about a man who in 1994 takes a low-paid job at a sandwich factory. At the factory he experiences meaninglessness and unhappiness – giving us a picture of his life and his unsatisfying job.

The story takes place at a sandwich factory in 1994. The factory seems like a typical food factory where mechanization is utilized to increase efficiency. Therefore employees monotonously work beside conveyer belts like robots and are controlled by managers who run the factory. The managers do not treat the employees properly as the workers are rated and marked from poor to excellent supposedly by their abilities and work effort but this is hardly always the case. “Someone always has to be rated excellent; he always chooses whoever had the best legs.” The employees are also locked in the factory if they are behind schedule or if there is a larger order than normal. This creates an environment where employees feel trapped and unhappy – putting pressure on them and forcing them to work long hours and faster. “There were three ways to respond to being locked in. Firstly no response, keep working at the same rate. Or start working faster so that the work would finish sooner and the doors would reopen. (...)” As a reader you get a negative outlook on the factory due to the narrator’s point of view. The picture “Relativity” by M.C. Escher illustrates this type of factory. A factory with many employees that all look the same. They have no expressions on their faces and they seem to have lost their identity as a result of the monotonous and boring work at the factory.