30 pages • 1 hour read
Elmer RiceThe Adding Machine
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1929A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Adding Machine
The physical object of the adding machine appears as a construct in Scene 2 and is the reason for Zero’s departure from the office. Zero is let go after twenty-five years of service to this company in favor of cheap labor in the form of someone who only needs to know how to push a button. However, Zero appears as an “adding machine” in his own right in both office scenes. Much of his self-worth is placed in his ability to contribute to society, particularly through his job and its consistency. When stressed (i.e. Scene 4), Zero resorts to adding numbers as a coping mechanism.
Metaphorically, the adding machine is a symbol of the future and a fast-approaching time when workers like Zero will be unnecessary to the modern office. By being made redundant, Zero reminds the audience that their own jobs, careers, self-worth, and even their lives are tenuous. Further, in the play’s version of the afterlife, even souls can be recycled. Here, Zero’s decision to remain a willing cog in the corporate sphere—despite having been executed and given permission to rest in whatever way he might desire—proves one’s core processors (or, values) remain the same, even after death.
A Human Head
Making an appearance in the graveyard at the end of Scene 6, a character by the name of The Head (who is a literal head that emerges suddenly from a grave) calls out to Zero and Shrdlu ordering them to be quiet and let him sleep. Unfortunately, while Zero has his wits about him, Shrdlu is in the middle of a meltdown and cannot be calmed. After failing to achieve the silence he so desires, The Head asks to borrow the skull of another corpse, Bill, which he proceeds to throw toward the duo. While it seems clear that The Head is more upset with the cats than the others in the graveyard, Shrdlu and Zero move away nonetheless.
The image of the graveyard at night is stark enough on its own, especially once populated by Judy and her date, and then Zero, followed by Shrdlu. Introducing a human head capable of throwing other skulls would have been quite an unusual decision for an American playwright in 1923—if this were not an expressionist work. As it is, this would have been used for the effect of the evocation of mood in the audience. Older plays and poems would have used the skull as an emblem of Romanticism or an earnest symbol of death, but here, the characters are already dead and standing in a graveyard. In this way, as an element of satire, one skull throwing another skull at a pair of dead murderers verges on comedy, without fully eliminating the element of morbidity from the scene.
Music
The most iconic use of music as symbolism in The Adding Machine occurs in Scene 7, in the Elysian Fields, when Shrdlu asks Zero if he can hear the music. He says that everyone else in the meadow can hear softly-playing music in the background all the time, but neither he nor Zero hears a thing. The audience may wonder at this distinction, but upon learning that those who are permitted to stay are generally artists, musicians, and other creative types, this difference begins to make sense. Their lack of hearing has more to do with moral compunction than anything else.
Once Daisy and Zero have opened up to one another and become intimate, they stop and listen for the music, and they can hear it. Daisy asks Zero if he can hear the music and he says he can’t. They sit silently for a moment, and then he can; his excitement swells so much that it makes him want to dance. But of course, once he rejects the power of the Elysian Fields, he loses his ability to hear the music. Daisy still can, and Shrdlu presumably never will. In a way, this speaks to their particular moral codes. Daisy wants happiness, harmony, and romantic love; Shrdlu seeks justice and religious rigor; and Zero values order and permanence.
At least one other scene in the play utilizes music, and that is Scene 2, which ends in a crescendo of noise:“Soft music is heard––the sound of the mechanical player of a distant merry-go-round. […] The music becomes gradually louder and the revolutions more rapid. […] His voice is drowned by the music. […] The music swells and swells. […] The noise is deafening, maddening, unendurable.” Rather than soothe, this music is meant to induce violence, to represent panic and fear and anger and act as a symbol of instability resulting in the death of Zero’s boss. It might also be seen as an aural symbol for the encroachment of technology upon the job that Zero now no longer has, having been replaced by an adding machine.
