JOB HISTORY

Introduction

Can you illustrate the life of a human being, simply through their job history? If you’ve read Annie Proulx’s short story ‘Job History’, then I’m sure that you have no doubt in your mind - yes, you can. But after concluding this, more questions spring to mind: ‘What if I hate my job - do I then also lead a life without happiness?’; ‘If my job is a reflection of my life quality, should I change my priorities and acknowledge that money is the most important thing in the world?’; ‘Am I working because I like my job, or because I like my monthly wage?’.

Narration is interesting in this short story. It is unusual in its form, due to the life story being told in fragments; almost as if we were reading a curriculum vitae, we are presented with jobs and major events and accomplishments inexhaustibly: ‘He takes a job pumping gas...’, ‘Leeland joins the army,...’, ‘He works with a snow-fence crew...’, ‘...he drives oil trucks.’, ‘They set up in business for themselves.’. That was quoted from approximately one single page.
Another interesting detail concerns the occasional reference to news. What is interesting about it, is that it is included with the job descriptions in the beginning, but fade out and in the end ‘Nobody has time to listen to the news.’. It seems to me as if the news are important and attractive in the beginning, where the main character just takes whatever job he can, but bleaks and loses relevance when he finally, accidentally breaks away from the conformity; from doing the natural thing, to doing something he likes and is good at. It is almost as if the devices of TV and other media are (at least to these people) just a way to flee life, to numb yourself. This theory is reinforced by the freshly widowed mother’s actions, she ‘...watches television all day.’, breaking this off only to sit in the kitchen ‘...saying almost nothing, picking small stones from dried beans.’

This short story covers quite some themes, from drug use to parenthood, which is only to be expected when a story like this covers years and years of living. I will dig into the most interesting theme:
-Social imbalance. We know quite well through reading this story, that the concerned family is of a somewhat low position in social ranking. They do not make very much money, they take whatever jobs they can get and so on. However when confronted with members of a higher place in that same ranking system, sparks fly. There’s the media mercilessly taking advantage of people with a lesser intelligence. There’s the financial crisis, where the smart people in D.C. and Wall Street attack the workers of for example Unique. And there is the fancy taxidermists, who move away again relatively quickly. Not to mention whatever authority who set out to build a new highway, isolating Unique from its former tourism business. This is a story of poor folks getting turned over by smarter people, through at least 3 generations. But it is also a story of luck, and when it comes to that, it would magically seem that these people have worse odds than their counterparts.

The setting of this story changes throughout it. But that doesn’t matter, because as the main character, who travels a lot, puts it: ‘...every place is the same.’.
As unlikely as that seems, you obviously would have an easy time convincing the main character Leeland. Leeland is put through a lot of misfortune, a lot of death and accident and poverty. Geographically speaking, every place is not the same. If you are a guy just trying to hang on, trying to live life decently, you would be working with the same types of people, for the same types of bosses, making the same kind of money for the trivial kind of work. You wouldn’t be ‘personal’, ‘reflective’, ‘enjoying’, you would just go on and on, and try to fight whatever obstacles the active world is throwing at you. Every little town, in every little redneck state, would be the same. And you would just be enduring it as you could.