Plum Plum Pickers Explication

Plum Plum Pickers Explication

What it means to be human

The Plum Plum Pickers is about workers who are trapped in low-paying, dead-end job, where they have to pick plums off of trees for a living. They unhappily do there job until the afternoon. So Raymond Barrio suggests that humans are not meant to live life mechanically or insensibly but to experience it with honor and pride through his literary styles.

In the first paragraph a worker is picking plum on a hot day, he is tired and exhausted. Barrio uses a one word sentence to describe and emphasize the state of being that the worker is in. He carefully chooses words such as “Brute… Beast... Savage… Wreck” (40) describing him in an animal-like sense. Barrio uses repetition to describes the workers surrounding as being “trapped in an endless maze of apricot trees as though forever, neat rows of them, neatly planted, row after row, just like the blackest bars on the jails of hell” (40). And ends it with the one word sentence that emphasizes its previous sentence, “Locked” (40) Because the worker is repetitiously picking the plum he works in a robotic way where he feels as though he’s trapped. This leads into “Lunch” (40) which is a sentence and a paragraph alone that makes it seem like time is flying by. Instead eating during the lunch break he “lay back on the cool ground for half an hour…then up again…the trees” (40). The description of the lunch break was so short that it leads right into work and once again everything starts all over again. The workers’ laboring seems mechanical when it says “he picked a mountain of cots automatically. An automator”(40). Afterwards the sun “penetrated the tree that was hiding him and split his forehead open…he blacked out” (40). Barrio uses the sun to symbolize the truth; basically the worker should not be doing this harsh job. And the workers’ name is finally introduced to the story; his name is Manuel which symbolically stands for man or manually which ties into his job.

Then “Midafternoon” (40), once again a one word sentence/paragraph which went by fast, described in a dreamlike trance. Then the whistle blew and work is done with for Manuel so it “Ended” (40). In front of the workers stand Robert Morales. He asked them all for two cents from every bucket of cots because there was a miscalculation. But Manuel flared and said “You promise to take nothing!” (40), feeling as though if Robert takes the money, then he has no honor or pride for his hard work. Then Manuel “tipped over his own last bucket of cots” (40) twice. Manuel refusing to give his money and kicking the bucket makes him more human like and less mechanical because he’s listening to himself this time. The plum symbolizes their pride because after seeing Manuel kick the bucket they stand over theirs and tried to do it to but Robert says “I shall take nothing this time” (40). And Manuel won along with pride and honor.

Therefore Raymond Barrio suggests that humans are not meant to live life mechanically or insensibly but to experience it with honor and pride. And so Barrio concludes “For men, are built for something more important and less trifling than the mere gathering of prunes and apricots, insensibly, mechanically…men are built to experience a certain sense of honor and pride”(40).