David is your average everyday guy. Middle aged, married with children, he lives the ideal middle class suburban life. A dedicated and competent professional, he works full-time in a big Multi National Corporation. During his days off he goes fishing, contributes to charity and involves himself in community service and attends church unfailingly every Sunday with his family. For those around him, he seems a happy guy content and well settled in life. But what they don’t know about David is his frequent pangs of anxiety, high tension which has led him to be a chronic heart patient, dissatisfaction with work and the sense of disquietude he feels in life. A highly trained architect passionate about buildings, David has been working for the past two decades in a faceless MNC so huge that he doesn’t even know the purpose of his job. He feels like the ancillary of a machine, replaceable and immaterial. “Don’t bring your work home”, his wife tells him every time he opens up about issues at the office. His only solace is the shrink’s couch that costs him 150 dollars an hour. Disenchanted, dissatisfied, David at age fifty has slowly realized this is all life is going to offer him and has resigned to his fate silently.
Perhaps the most significant critique of alienation is given by Karl Marx who emphasizes on the economic basis of alienation. According to Marx, the worker is alienated from the product he creates, his labour becoming a commodity to be purchased while he himself moves on to become an object to be bought in the ‘labour market’. His dignity is taken away from him; he belongs no longer to himself.
Interesting article about alienation at the workplace. In the novel, alienation is a big theme and his theme is still relevant in our current society. Alienation can go up to the point that people are really unhappy, with a result of a depression or a burn-out. Read the full article on: http://www.fetelina.com/the-individual-alienation-and-the-workplace/
Tessa Spierings 