Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
Picture the giant, endless warehouse in the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. That's what Slocum's talking about.
Okay, you got us. So the storeroom isn't actually a warehouse full of treasures, dead bodies, biblical artifacts, or anything like that. It's actually just a room filled with paperwork back at Slocum's first job at the auto insurance agency.
But you know us too well, Shmoopers, and we're talking symbolism here. The storeroom is also a vast, metaphorical place in Slocum's mind where he keeps memories from his past. With people all around Slocum either going crazy or dying, he keeps his sanity (maybe) by storing them in his mind once they're gone and moving on with his life. He's already placed his mother and Virginia in there, and once Martha, the typist in his department, finally goes crazy, she too will be filed away in his mind.
When we consider the large number of people who've passed in and out of Slocum's life, we think that he probably could fill up an entire storeroom. But just how meaningful have their lives been to him? Does the storeroom symbolize just how insignificant our lives are to other people? Or does it mean that life goes on after death? For Slocum, the storeroom is both a place where people are filed away and forgotten, and where life goes on after death.
Everybody in Slocum's world—the world of corporate America—is pretty much just a cog in a great big machine, a piece of paperwork to be filed away and ultimately forgotten. In a way, Slocum's just kind of going along with that. What else can he really do?
We never said this book wasn't a bummer.