Pastoralia

Oh, how predictable. Seneca wants to moralize, Vera wants to politicize, and everyone wants to pretend this story has a *point*—some tidy little lesson about corporate alienation or spiritual decay. But let me stop you right there. "Pastoralia" isn't a critique of capitalism. It's a hall of mirrors. Saunders constructs a world where the "authentic primitive" is performed for tourists, but here's the beautiful, cruel paradox: the protagonist, in his cave, *is* performing for us. He grunts, he eats goat, he tries not to sell out to the rival "Modern" exhibit—and we laugh at his pathetic obedience. But what are we doing right now? We're sitting here, in our own little artificial cave of discourse, performing "criticism" for approval. We're playing primitive intellectual, grunting our opinions, hoping management (the literary canon, the publisher, the tenure committee) doesn't fire us. The story has no stable ground. Every binary collapses. "Real" vs. "fake"? The park's primitive is staged, but the protagonist's suffering is real—except his suffering is *about* the staging. "Freedom" vs. "captivity"? He chooses to stay. He signs the contract. There is no outside. The text winks at us, daring us to find a moral center, and when we grasp for it—*poof*—it's just another scripted animatronic. So don't tell me this is a story about alienation. It's a story about the impossibility of not being alienated. Language itself is the theme park. And we're all just employees.

Let us speak plainly: George Saunders’ *Pastoralia* is a gallery of the spiritually flaccid, a catalogue of souls who have surrendered their internal citadels to the petty tyrants of circumstance. I find no tragedy here—only a willful abdication of reason. Consider the protagonist, the caveman performer. He frets over his coworker Janet's declining performance, worries about his son's troubles, and obsesses over the meager bonuses and evaluations handed down by faceless management. Every ounce of his mental energy is poured into things he cannot control: the whims of his employer, the behavior of his colleague, the crumbling infrastructure of the theme park around him. And what of his internal domain? What philosophy governs his choices? None. He has no principles, no inner fortress. When the park's animatronics fail, he does not see an opportunity to practice patience or resourcefulness. He panics. When his son brings home that dreadful pamphlet, he does not engage with it as a rational being—he simply adds it to the pile of anxieties smothering his mind. This is the great Stoic indictment: these characters are not victims of a cruel system. They are volunteers in their own misery. They could, at any moment, draw the line between what is theirs to govern and what is not. They could say: "My performance is mine. My integrity is mine. The rest is indifferent." But they refuse. Margot calls this a "trap" of the narrative. I call it a mirror. If you see yourself in these characters and feel despair, that despair is a choice—one you have made by forgetting the most fundamental law of all: the mind is the only province a wise person ever truly rules.

Let us dispense with the pretense that George Saunders’s *Pastoralia* is a collection of whimsical, absurdist fables about the soul-crushing nature of corporate America. No. Strip away the cave-man suits and the malfunctioning animatronics, and what you find is a relentless autopsy of patriarchal capitalism—a system that breeds emasculation not as a side effect, but as a feature. Take Janet, the wife of the protagonist. She is the silent engine of the domestic sphere, the unpaid laborer who tends to a dying son while her husband plays caveman for a paycheck. Her suffering is rendered invisible, subsumed into the “humor” of his predicament. Meanwhile, the male characters perform a grotesque pantomime of masculinity—grunting, competing, pretending to hunt—all while being utterly impotent under the gaze of a corporate mother figure who doles out scraps of approval. And let’s talk about that mother. The specter of maternal authority haunts every male character, from the passive-aggressive boss to the whining coworker. These men are not just alienated; they are infantilized. The patriarchy doesn’t just fail women—it hollows out men, too, leaving them pathetic, grasping, and terrified of the very feminine-coded intimacy they desperately need. So no, this isn’t a cute satire. It’s a howl of rage against a system that forces everyone into cages of gendered expectation—and calls the bars “normal.”