The main plotline follows Paul's development from an uncritical cog in the system to one of its outspoken critics. Paul, for all intents and purposes, is the living embodiment of what a man within the system should strive to be, and the Shah is a visitor from a very different culture and so applies a very different context to whatever he sees on his tour. The purpose of the two plotlines is to give two perspectives of the system: one from an insider who is emblematic of the system, and one from an outsider who is looking in on it. The secondary plotline follows the American tour of the Shah of Bratpuhr, a spiritual leader of six million residents in a distant, underdeveloped nation. Paul Proteus (referred to as Paul), an intelligent, 35-year-old factory manager of Ilium Works. The more prominent plotline follows the protagonist, Dr. Player Piano develops two parallel plotlines that converge only briefly and then insubstantially, at the beginning and the end of the novel. The bifurcation of the population is represented by the division of Ilium, New York into "The Homestead," where every person not a manager or an engineer lives, and the other side of the river, where all the engineers and the managers live. The novel begins ten years after the war, when most factory workers have been replaced by machines. While most Americans were fighting overseas, the nation's managers and engineers faced a depleted workforce and responded by developing ingenious automated systems that allowed the factories to operate with only a few workers. Player Piano is set in the near future, after a third world war.
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