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“I take capitalism personally” In THE ABSENT a nameless and almost faceless narrator’s experience as an employee at a modern medical supply company in transition becomes an everyman’s tale of the disenfranchised American worker. Faces begin to emerge from a crowd of names as the narrator settles into an acceptable job, yet the narrator’s generally nihilistic and hostile attitude towards the so-called American Dream is understandable, as we find the busy hive of his colorful co-workers eliminated one by one in the name of efficiency. Their attitudes emerge between detailed observations of inter-office politics and off-time spent in drunken escapades and extra-marital affairs—and we discover our narrator mostly reflected by his relationships to those around him: an inverted story, as much from the co-workers’ perspectives as the eye of the narrator. |
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