To honor Labor Day, I want to talk about the role of jobs and work in Community Day.
The novel is set in a depressed rural area. People have become atomized and suspicious. The sense of community has been lost.
When a society is healthy, work doesn’t dominate our lives, but it does contribute meaningfully to them. When a society is unhealthy, work contributes to the sickness.
I wanted to emphasize this theme from the very start. So at the beginning of Chapter 2—after a few essential characters are introduced—the narrator starts the discussion of work:
Most families have been in the area for generations. The locals now generally work for the prison, the school system, or what’s left of farms in the Ohunka Valley and a few industries extracting what’s remaining in the hills to the south.
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