Specialist Study “Microserfs” by Douglas Coupland Alistair Stevens
The novel I read recently is called “Microserfs”, it was written by Douglas Coupland. I enjoyed reading this prose; it is satire on modern day companies and working practices. I found this humorous. The book is based on a diary written by a Microsft employee named Daniel. He keeps the diary on his laptop and updates it everyday. At the start of the book Daniel works at Microsoft, he seems to have a good job and he has a lot of shipping deadlines to meet. He works in a group and shares a house with the people in this group. These people are Susan, Todd, Abe, Bug Barbacue and Michael. Later in the book Daniel moves to work on a lego based game in the Silicon Valley. In this essay I will show the literary techniques Douglas Coupland uses to potray modern day employment.
Although I am studying the employment aspect of this book Coupland also shows Daniels relationship with his family and his friends throughout the book. At the start Daniel lives with his friends in their shared house, later “Karla” joins them, as she is Daniels girlfriend. After Daniel meets Karla he becomes more of an independent person, he’ll leave the Microsoft complex to meat Karla at Nintendo every lunchtime. “Mid-morning, I mountain-biked over to nintendo headquarters, across Interstate 520 from Microsoft.” Daniels relationship with his family is also shown in this book. His Family is his Mum, Dad and his Brother Jed who was killed in a boating accident when he was young. Daniel is shown to be always thinking about Jed and his password for his computer at work is “hellojed”. The life of his parents goes from bad to worse in this book. The first we hear of his parent is when his mother phones him to tell about his Dad being made redundent. The book ends with his Dad being retired and his mum having a stroke after trying to get fit again.
