...The Sandwich Factory A: Write an Essay The central theme of the short story The Sandwich Factory is the mechanization of the workers/ humans at the factory. The story takes place in 1994 at a sandwich factory, where we meet the narrator who works there. Through him we get the impression that the employees are no longer considered humans or individuals, but almost nearly as machines, and he realizes that he doesn't want to be a part of this development. The narrator of the story is a 1st person narrator who restricts his own view to the factory. It is important that we hear his thoughts and his opinion, and that doesn't mean that we a 100% can rely on what he tells - in particular in some of the descriptions of the characters. The narrator mentions his Joy Division records, his Camuls novels and the novel Confessions of a Mark. This indicates that he is an intelligent man and in addition it also indicates that he probably is a student who has taken a low-paid job to make some money. 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...
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...TOPIC:-What is Moral Fable? How can you say that Hard Times is a Moral Fable? BY: CHETAN ANKUR Moral fable combines the left (logical) & right (creative) side of the brain, so it both entertains creatively and validates certain types of behaviour, morally. The creative part is the fairy tale which often involves animals rather than humans. It speaks to our hearts as it entertains us; the ending is the logical, moral conclusion that satisfies our logical brains and seems "right". The problem with all moral fables is that there are often 2 sides to the same story ... things are rarely so black and white in reality ... so there could be more than one ending ... e.g. there are times when speed is necessary over steadiness - of course, there also has to be good judgement. Although it is not appropriate to describe a work of art, which Hard Times undoubtedly is, as a moral fable or a morality play, yet the fact remains that there is a strong moral intention behind this novel. Hard Times is a satirical attack on some of the evils and vices of Victorian society. Satire has always corrective purpose and is therefore basically moral in its approach to the subjects it deals with. Apart from that, there are passages of direct moralising in this novel. Hard Times is a novel which from the moment of its publication aroused very different sentiments in the reading public. Dickens's reasons for writing Hard Times were mostly monetary. Sales of...
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...Stephen lives in a dingy dirty part of Coketown among a group of people referred to as “The Hands”. These people are the lowest part of society are merely the workers who toil day after day to manufacture and perpetuate the products of the industry in Coketown . Stephen is forty years old and is married to a drunk and distressed wife who is constantly drinking away her sorrows from being part of the lower echelon of society as well as wandering in and out of his life. Blackpool dreams of being free of their marriage and re-marrying another character, Rachel, however their love cannot be as for a person in his social status divorce does not come easily. Stephen works in one of Bounderby’s factories as a power loom weaver, and worked long hard hours for meager pay just to sustain himself. Despite all of these misfortunes that he had to endure during his daily life, Blackpool was a man of great faith and integrity. He was a firm Christian and believed that his trials were not in vain, proving so by living that philosophy every day. All of these traits together bring the reader a picture of a poor in money but rich in spirit middle-aged man who works hard for a living and is an overall admirable character in the storyline. The time in which Blackpool lived, the 19th century, was at the heart of the industrial revolution and Stephens’ character in the novel was the backbone of what drove the industrial revolution to such success. “Coketown” is a stereotypical industrial town...
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...19th Century Life Criticized Hard Times is a novel written by Charles Dickens in the mid 1800’s. Hard Times criticizes the philosophy of Utilitarianism (Hard Times, 2013). “Dickens believed that Utilitarianism reduced social relations to cold self-interest.”(Hard Times, 2013) This reduced social relation can be seen throughout the novel. Dickens criticizes several aspects of 19th-century life. Dickens criticizes the treatment of children, the life of factory workers, the relationship between employer and employee, and the city they live in. Dickens shows how little respect there is for the children of the time. The children in the school are numbered. They are called by their number and not by their names. Mr. Gradgrind points out Sissy Jupe and calls her “Girl number twenty.” (Dickens, 1854, pg. 10) Gradgrind showed no respect for her name or who she said she was. He insisted that “Sissy” was not a name and that she should only refer to herself as “Cecilia” (Dickens, 1854). Sissy attempted to answer Gradgrind’s questions and he interrupted her every time. Gradgrind’s idea of teaching is to only feed children facts. Children are not allowed to imagine or fancy things. “You are never to fancy,” said a gentleman and Gradgrind confirmed his statement (Dickens, 1854, pg. 14). The only thing the children are to be taught and to repeat is fact. The children are not allowed to have a mind of their own. Dickens raises many contemporary issues in his treatment...
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...“The Sandwich Factory” is a short story written by Jason Kennedy and released in 2007. The story deals with a man who works at a sandwich factory. He is low-paid and is slowly getting tired of many things at the factory; the workers, the manager and especially the conveyor belt. We get an insight in his thoughts about not only the factory, but also his real life. The short story takes place in a sandwich factory in 1994. It seems like the typical factory, with a conveyor belt surrounded by a lot of workers, who seems to be working automatically, just like machines. At the same time, the workers are being controlled by spiteful executives. The managers are not treating the workers right though, and is rating and marking the workers, ranging from “poor” to “excellent”. Even the rating is not done properly by the managers: “Someone always has to be rated excellent; he always chooses whoever had the best legs“ (s. 2, l. 23-24). It’s very downgrading towards the workers and it is one of the things that the main character is annoyed with. It is the same thing every day, over and over again and the factory is similar to a giant mechanism operating non-stop. This is another thing that is aggravating our main character: “[…] where similarly bored and unhappy workers attended daily … “ (p. 3, l. 51-52). He seems very discontented about his job and is noticing everything that he thinks is wrong with the factory. Even the smallest things are annoying him. The hairnets, the cold tomato-slices...
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...TOPIC:-What is Moral Fable? How can you say that Hard Times is a Moral Fable? BY: CHETAN ANKUR Moral fable combines the left (logical) & right (creative) side of the brain, so it both entertains creatively and validates certain types of behaviour, morally. The creative part is the fairy tale which often involves animals rather than humans. It speaks to our hearts as it entertains us; the ending is the logical, moral conclusion that satisfies our logical brains and seems "right". The problem with all moral fables is that there are often 2 sides to the same story ... things are rarely so black and white in reality ... so there could be more than one ending ... e.g. there are times when speed is necessary over steadiness - of course, there also has to be good judgement. Although it is not appropriate to describe a work of art, which Hard Times undoubtedly is, as a moral fable or a morality play, yet the fact remains that there is a strong moral intention behind this novel. Hard Times is a satirical attack on some of the evils and vices of Victorian society. Satire has always corrective purpose and is therefore basically moral in its approach to the subjects it deals with. Apart from that, there are passages of direct moralising in this novel. Hard Times is a novel which from the moment of its publication aroused very different sentiments in the reading public. Dickens's reasons for writing Hard Times were mostly monetary. Sales of...
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...Hard Times |Theme Analysis | | | | | | | |[pic][pic][pic][pic][pic] | | | |Head versus Heart | |Hard Times shows the inadequacy of an approach to life that emphasizes only the human intellect at | |the expense of the imagination and the heart. The character who most embodies the false approach is | |Thomas Gradgrind. Gradgrind worships facts and figures and prides himself on being very practical. He| |thinks that the only things valuable in life are those that can be objectively measured. He believes | |that human behavior can be shaped for the better by the rational application of practical knowledge. | |Gradgrind refuses to accept the validity of "fancy" or imagination; only practical things matter, and| |he puts his faith in abstract theories rather than direct observation of how real people behave, and | |what their real needs...
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...How does Dickens expose the failings of utilitarianism in his novel Hard Times? Utilitarianism is a term quite unfamiliar among today’s generation, therefore let me start by defining what this word means. Utilitarianism says an action is morally right if it benefits the greatest number of people. You determine what is right by calculating the amount of pleasure or suffering your actions may cause. The opinion of the majority is more important than that of the minority. Book1 Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out nothing else." These are the first sentences the reader will read. Pretty harsh words to say to a classroom full of children, whose minds are bubbling to the brim with imagination meaning the reader, will automatically be put into the utilitarian way of thinking as soon as he/she opens the book. When you get further into book1 the reader realises that this novel is based on a time when utilitarianism dominated the country. Children are known for their wide imagination, their vivid thoughts; yet throughout book 1 we see Mr Gradgrind trying to sap it all out of them. Dickens was trying to show the negative side of imagination and human emotions depriving people of enjoying the qualities they were supposedly carrying with them. Children had no names but numbers; there is no room from an imaginative answer. A good example of this is with Bitzer and Sissy- both children...
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...INTRODUCTION Fifty years of ever-broadening commerce! Fifty years of ever- brightening science! Fifty years of ever-widening Empire! (Lord Tennyson, On the Jubilee of Queen Victoria) The age that followed the Romantic Age, the age of Queen Victoria, that spanned almost the whole of the nineteenth century was an age consolidation in many respects. Increase of wealth, the general prosperity of England as a whole an account of its colonial hold over other countries, immense growth in scientific and industrial development, are some of the clearly noticeable characteristics of this age. Lord Tennyson, the poet laureate of Victorian era glorifies the reign of Queen Victorian through his ode On the Jubilee of Queen Victoria. On the other side of this picture of commercial and scientific expansion we see the appalling social condition of new industrial cities, the squalid slums, and the exploitation of cheap labour ,the painful fight by the enlightened to introduce social legislation and Victorians were caught between materialism and spiritualism, between realism and romanticism, peace and unrest, science and religion, mechanism and humanism .They could not give up the conventional morality or religious practices...
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...April 1854. Morley claimed that over the previous three years, there had been a hundred deaths and nearly twelve thousand accidents in factories in England. These figures were disputed by other contemporary commentators, but there is no doubt that many serious accidents did occur, often caused by unguarded machinery. In Hard Times, there is a reference to people being "chopped up" by machinery (Book 2, chapter 1). Factory workers sought to protect their own interests by joining trade unions, which were growing in power in the 1850s. But the unions often faced fierce opposition from employers. A notorious example of industrial conflict took place in Preston, a textile-manufacturing town in northwest England, not far from Dickens's fictional Coketown. In October 1853, between fifteen and sixteen thousand weavers went on strike for better pay. The mill owners responded by closing the mills. A bitter struggle ensued, in which the...
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...The industrial revolution was a time of great technological changes. It revolutionised everything, from the way people lived to where they worked, but what society often overlooked was how ordinary people went through their day to day lives. In the book ‘Hard Times’, Charles Dickens has produced some exceptional characters to represent the complexity of each social class. From the arrogance of aristocracy to the struggle of the common workers, and the way in which they cope with the many hardships they will endure. Charles Dickens was able to personify the different social classes. The real reason why Charles Dickens wrote Hard Times was because he was low on funds, this was due to his sales being low on his periodical magazine “Household words”. He hoped by writing this novel in instalments would bale him out by increasing his profits. However, Dickends wished to satirize radical utilitarians who dickens thought to be ‘those who see figures and averages, and nothing else’. He also wished to campaign for reform of working conditions. In as early as 1839, dickens visted factories in Manchester and was appalled by the conditions workers had to work in. Furthermore, Charles Dickens gives us a close up look into what appears to be the ivory tower of the bourgeoisie of his day, yet these middle-class characters are viewed from a singular perspective, the perspective of those at the bottom of the social and economic system. Though Dickens characters tend to be well developed and...
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...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...
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...The Industrial Revolution: A Means to an End Capitalism is the result of constant revolutions led by a lower class. Karl Marx states that the “modern bourgeois is itself the product of a long course of development of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange”(Marx, 160). The bourgeoise are the group of people who were able to seize control of the means of production for their community. They control the manufacturing of all the resources the people might need. The bourgeois maintain command of the production while the proletariat are the ones who carry out the actual work. Marx believed the only limiting factors of the proletariat’s status beneath the bourgeois were the current level of technology available and, although that technology is keeping them down, it will advance to the point of giving the proletariat a chance to shrink the gap between themselves and those above them, “but with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number, it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows and it feels that strength more”(166). The Industrial Revolution was the gateway to modern economics and ushered in an age of poorer working standards, profit based business models, and the end to artisanship. The Industrial Revolution was the beginning of a new type of economy. The machines and inventions spawned during this time allowed people to perform certain tasks much more efficiently and increased the level of production...
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...Семинар 6. Вопрос 1 THE VICTORIAN AGE The Victorian Compromise The Victorian Age takes its name from Queen Victoria who ruled from 1837 to 1901; it was a complex era characterised by stability, progress and social reforms, and, in the mean time, by great problems such as poverty, injustice and social unrest; that’s why the Victorians felt obliged to promote and invent a rigid code of values that reflected the world as they wanted it to be, based on: * duty and hard work; * respectability: a mixture of both morality and hypocrisy, severity and conformity to social standards (possessions of good manners, ownership of a comfortable house, regular attendance at church and charitable activity); it distiguished the middle from the lower classes; * charity and philanthropy: an activity that involved many people, expecially women. The family was strictly patriarchal: the husband represented the authority and respectability, cosequently a single woman with a child was emarginated because of a wide-spread sense of female chastity. Sexuality was generaly repressed and that led to extreme manifestations of prudery. Colonialism was an important phenomenon and it led to a patriotism deeply influenced by ideas of racial superiority: British people thought that they were obeying to God by the imposition of their superior way of life. The concept of “the white man’s burden” was exalted in the works of colonial writers (such as Rudyard Kipling). This code of values, known...
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...HOW DID INDUSTRIALISATION AFFECT THE HEALTH OF THE BRITISH WORKERS? The Industrial Revolution is often referred to as a key period in the economic and social history of Britain. Industrialisation refers to the gradual change from traditional, agricultural methods to those involving some form of mechanised, factory based production. Britain was the first nation in the world to go through the process of becoming industrialised. The industrial Revolution is thought to have begun at some time in the 18th century, and continued to the 20th century. Historical evidence shows that, during this period, industrialisation transformed British society and the lives of British people. Social transformation did not happen suddenly,as though one Britain was a pre-industrial, agricultural society and next it was ‘indusrtialised’. There was a gradual change in methods of production and the location of people’s work that combined with other important social, political and economic developments-are linked to the developments of major health and social welfare problems. This essay is going to look at how industrialisation At the beginning of the 18th century, Britain was primarly an agricultural country with most people living in rural areas. The population of Britain was only 9 million, but was about to expand rapidly. The majority of workers and industries operated within domestic system. This involved people working in their own homes to produce goods, or components of goods, and also to...
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