Textual Analysis Of Jon By George Saunders

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Tanner Grose Emily Maloney ENG 101-022 Tuesday, October 28, 2014 Textual Analysis of Jon by George Saunders Rough Draft Jon by George Saunders is told through the lens of a teenage boy in a dystopia society called The Facility. The Facility is located somewhere in the Midwest and is operated by people called Coördinator’s whose job is managing the groups of children within The Facility. The plot surrounds Jon as he explores events that occurred during his time at the Facility and how they shaped his own humanity. Like most literature that takes place in a dystopia, Jon acts a cautionary tale that reveals the depth of our own society’s obsession with consumerism and materialistic social status through The Facilities desire to create hyper-efficient …show more content…

The influence of technology within the setting is exposed in the lack of humanity and emotional health of the characters. A drug called Aurobon is administered daily to every citizen that rids them of unwanted, inefficient emotions creating completely complacent humans. The introductory paragraphs of Jon exposes this ideal very quickly through scenes depicting “the healthy benefits of getting off by oneself and doing what one feels like in terms of self-touching” which is later expanded upon by an explanation that “love is a mystery but the mechanics of love need not be, so go off alone, see what is up, with you and your relation to your own gonads”. The lack of emotion evident in these first paragraphs presents the first glance into the utter lack of the human condition within the short …show more content…

As a drone, brainwashed by The Facility and the daily doses of Aurabon, Jon cannot comprehend his feelings of love without comparing them to commercials and the products pushed through The Facility. The first evidence of this is found in the eighth paragraph where Jon states: I had many times seen LI 34321 for Honey Grahams, where the stream of milk and the stream of honey enjoin to make that river of sweet-tasting goodness, I did not know that, upon making love, one person may become like the milk and the other like the honey… they just become one fluid. (Saunders 239). Although the dark lines are in a way beautiful and can successfully express Jon’s interpretation of his feelings, the manner in which it is done just further exemplifies how the super-efficient professional product assessment done in The Facility transforms the basis of the human condition into an excretion of the tensionless society’s controlled manipulation. This manipulation is eerily similar to our own society desire to create satisfied consumers and a perfect product just with a dark

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