How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
I think that maybe in every company today there is always at least one person who is going crazy slowly. (2.21)
Slocum describes how in both of his previous companies, as well as the one in which he currently works, people have killed themselves. That doesn't say anything good about the life of white-collar office workers. What's perhaps even more maddening is that after their deaths, they are filed away and probably forgotten.
Quote #2
People in the company like to live well and are unusually susceptible to nervous breakdowns. (2.24)
Nervous breakdowns are frequent in this novel, but like machines, people can be easily fixed and back working again before others within the department even notice they are gone. But are they really fixed? What's actually going on here? Why do these nervous breakdowns continually happen?
Quote #3
And I'm not so confident anymore that my own recollections of my childhood are as infallible as I have always believed them to be. I also think I may have been more unhappy than my daughter when I was young, and felt even more entrapped than she does in my own sense of pathless isolation. (4.8)
Slocum doesn't think his memories from his own life are entirely credible. Is Slocum a reliable narrator? Why or why not?