Cows

Stokoe establishes a deliberate parallel between two environments that dominate Steven’s early life: the apartment where he is force-fed his mother’s rancid cooking and the meat plant where he spends his working hours feeding animal remains into a grinder. Both spaces reduce bodies to material to be controlled, processed, and consumed, while place Steven within systems whose rule she initially lacks the power to challenge. By situating Steven at the intersection of domestic brutality and industrial slaughter, Stokoe argues that alienation in this novel is not incidental but systemic, a condition reinforced by environments that repeatedly reduce living begins to their physical usefulness.

The meat plant is described from Steven’s first day in terms that emphasize the erasure of individual identity. The processing line receives cows through a hole in the wall, and by the time those animals exit the system, they have been reduced to what the narration calls “chunks of unsupported flesh” (11)—matter stripped of any quality that might connect it to the living creature it once was. Process hands work the line with mechanical detachment, while specialized machinery divides, crushes, and homogenizes the bodies moving through it. Steven’s assignment to the grinder places him at the endpoint of this process, where even the remaining distinctions between pieces of flesh disappear into uniform “pulp.” The repetitive labor becomes so rhythmic and simple that Steven loses himself within it. This mechanization encourages the worker to become as automatic as the machines themselves, performing a narrow function within a system whose larger violence becomes increasingly ordinary.

The plant’s physical and social hierarchy further underscores this alienation. Administrative workers remain separated from the direct violence of production, while process hands occupy specialized positions along the line and Cripps’s elite slaughter party performs the actual killing. Movement through this hierarchy is associated with increased proximity to violence and greater desensitization toward it. Cripps openly disdains those who remain removed from the killing and treats direct participation in slaughter as a higher form of existence, pointing them out to Steven and saying, “God, what beauty. […] They are the genesis. They create what the rest of you only work with. They know themselves, boy. They looked inside and weren’t afraid to drag out what they found” (28). Industrial exploitation develops into something psychologically corrosive, as the institution begins teaching its workers to interpret their own desensitization as superiority. Cripps represents the endpoint of this process, having turned the violence of his occupation into an ideology in which domination becomes the measure of personal worth.

Gummy serves as another variation on this corruption. His physical disfigurement and compulsive behavior reveal how thoroughly the boundaries between work, violence, sexuality, and identity have broken down within the plant. Rather than presenting slaughter as an activity workers simply perform and then leave behind, the novel repeatedly shows its logic entering their understanding of themselves and one another. Steven undergoes the same progression. He begins the job horrified by what he sees, but repeated exposure gradually changes his relationship to the violence around him. That which is initially viewed by Steven as monstrous eventually becomes familiar, and these same concepts become available as a model for behavior outside the workplace. His growing participation in the slaughterhouse culture parallels his movement from victim of violence to perpetrator.

Steven’s own alienation extends beyond the plant into the texture of his daily existence. On the bus to work, he experiences the other passengers as more solidly real than he is, their outlines sharper, the air around them “bright with the definition of their existence” as he feels himself “blurring with the sunlight” (7). This imagery conveys alienation as a loss of coherent identity: Steven experiences himself as somehow less fully present than the people around him. His employment initially seems capable of solving this problem because work offers wages and the possibility of financing the conventional life he desires. Instead, the slaughterhouse gives him another model of existence based on hierarchy, utility, and domination. Ironically, the job Steven hopes will provide him entry into ordinary society instead helps teach him the behaviors that carry him further outside it. The slaughterhouse and its logic become embedded in Steven’s understanding of power until he reproduces its hierarchy and violence within the underground society he eventually leads.