The Snail on the Slope: Analysis of Major Characters
"The Snail on the Slope" presents a complex exploration of its major characters, primarily focusing on the contrasting figures of Pepper and Kandid. Pepper, a linguist, symbolizes the intellectual burden of navigating a Kafkaesque bureaucracy while yearning for deeper understanding of a primal forest that the Directorate seeks to control. He embodies the frustration of being intellectually superior yet perceived as incompetent, ultimately becoming complicit in the absurdity of the system he criticizes. In contrast, Kandid, a scientist stranded in the chaotic forest, faces the rawness of nature and its primitive inhabitants, grappling with his own inability to articulate meaningful patterns amid disorder. His experiences reflect a struggle against both the chaos of the forest and the rigid expectations of civilization.
Supporting characters like Nava, Kandid's wife, embody the tension between the desire for stability and the inevitable pull of the wild. Meanwhile, bureaucratic figures such as Claudius-Octavian Hausbotcher and Acey provide insight into the oppressive structures that govern their lives, revealing a landscape rife with absurdity and power dynamics. Through their interactions and journeys, the characters highlight themes of power, humanity, and the search for meaning within a system that often defies logic. This character analysis invites readers to consider the complexities of individuality and the often absurd nature of societal constraints.
The Snail on the Slope: Analysis of Major Characters
Authors: Boris Strugatsky and Arkady Strugatsky
First published: 1980 (“Kandid” in Ellinskii sekret, 1966; “Pepper” in Baikal, 1968; as Ulitka na sklone, 1989)
Genre: Novel
Locale: A forest on another planet
Plot: Science fiction
Time: The near future
Pepper, the central figure, a linguist who tries to escape the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the Directorate and seek illumination from a distant contemplation of the primal forest that the Directorate strives to contain and destroy. Intellectually superior, he is nevertheless treated with condescending tolerance as a bumbling, naïve incompetent. He flees one nightmarish situation after another: wrestling with the illogic of a Forest Study Group bent on eradication and with the jargon-ridden nonsense of Directorate communications, encountering blindfolded men seeking a lost classified machine the sight of which is forbidden, being caught up in meaningless bureaucratic processes (such as room repairs scheduled at midnight), overhearing machines debating when they should demonstrate their dominance over humans, and finally finding himself inexplicably supplanting the old Director. Faced with the mechanistic, he feels compelled to exercise reason and to seek explanations. For him, hope lies in the human decency of “considerate” and “hospitable” people, but his peregrinations never reveal any. After a lifetime of senseless activities performed at the bequest of nonsensical directives, Pepper so accommodates himself to the system that, when he can bring change, he is trapped by a historical accumulation of absurdities that determine the course of his own directives, ones as cruel, chaotic, and meaningless as those of his much deplored predecessors. Pepper is the prototype of the intellectual who theorizes about life (the Forest) from a distance, is repulsed by closer contact with it, and is, in the end, content to be seduced by power. His “yearning for understanding” (what he calls “his sickness”) is cured at the cost of his humanity.
Kandid, Pepper's counterpart, a scientist who, after ejecting from his crashing helicopter, finds himself trapped in the alien and ever changing forest among primitive villagers. Assumed to be dead by his colleagues, Kandid spends his time seeking a way back to “civilization.” Kandid, like Voltaire's Candide, travels amid alien peoples and, while seeking vainly to comprehend the incomprehensible, furthers the authors' satiric purpose. Unlike Pepper, Kandid is immersed in the Forest and lives amid the chaos and disorder of nature, facing bandits and organic anomalies (faceless men, disappearing villages, mermaids and Amazonian Maidens, “Swampings,” “Harrowings,” and “deadlings”). Nicknamed “Dummy” by the narrow-minded villagers, who find him eccentric and slightly mad, he is later feared for his power to wield a scalpel to destroy “deadlings,” odd forest creatures whose touch burns. Kandid is metaphorically too close to the trees to see the forest (he is at the other extreme from Pepper) and, consequently, suffers from a strange inability to retain ideas or to find meaningful patterns or relationships. With heart and head in conflict, Kandid refuses to succumb to his situation. His conclusions that annihilating populations for the sake of some nebulous theory about progress is wrong, that nature may be outside the concepts of good and bad but that humans are not, and that one must look at the Authority and the Forest both “from the side” seem to voice the authors' views.
Nava, Kandid's chattering, clinging child-wife, who pressures him to accept the monotonous “vegetable way of life” of her village and who complains of the dangers inherent in escape. Her mother, kidnapped by “deadlings,” has become one of the matriarchal Maidens, whose generative power is responsible for the peculiarities of the Forest. Although she saves Kandid's life, clearly Nava will join the Maidens as a parthenogenetic power, a regenerative and reproductive force methodically directing the burgeoning growth and change of the Forest in its progress toward a future clear to the Maidens but not to others.
Claudius-Octavian Hausbotcher, the quintessential bureaucrat, ignorant and narrow-minded. With dark, piercing eyes and a long, stony face, Hausbotcher records deviant statements and actions and is obsessed with paperwork, permits, and regulations. He meets chaos with regimen, dismisses the unfamiliar as mysticism, and supports the party line as inviolate. He intimidates subordinates and toadies up to superiors.
Acey, a sexually obsessed Directorate driver convicted of passport violations and theft, a Neanderthal who guzzles yogurt and speculates on the peculiar characteristics of the Forest. He has a darkly handsome, Italianate face, with bushy eyebrows, lively eyes, and flashing teeth. His feet smell, and his narrations focus on sexual exploits. His hairy arms are tattooed with the phrases “What destroys us” and “Ever onward,” cryptic comments on Directorate goals. As Pepper's driver, Acey provides a sense of how much Pepper has capitulated to power when Pepper regrets not being able to castrate him for his own good.
Alevtina, a photo lab worker determined to become Pepper's mistress, despite his aversion to sex. She helps Pepper take over as Director and becomes the guiding power behind the scenes, suggesting the direction his orders should take, theorizing about the historical continuity of bureaucratic power, and praising his new measures (such as orders to the Eradication Group to self-eradicate).