Status Class Exploitation in the Short Story of The Short Happy Life of Conat

32 Pages·2013·2.31 MB·English

Status Class Exploitation in the Short Story of The Short Happy Life
of Conat

THESIS
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree of
Sarjana Pendidikan

Janti Swastyastu Ristiyono Putri
112007065

ENGLISH DEPARTMENT
FACULTY OF LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
SATYA WACANA CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY
SALATIGA
2013
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UNIYERSTTAS KRISTEN SATYA WACANA
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Emil: librry(@drn.ukw,edu ; htq://librry.ulsuedu
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Status Class Exploitation in the Short Story of The Short Happy Life
of Conat

THESIS
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree of
Sarjana Pendidikan

Janti Swastyastu Ristiyono Putri
112007065

Approved by:

i
COPYRIGHT STATEMENT

This thesis contains no such material as has been submitted for examination in
any course or accepted for the fulfillment of any degree or diploma in any
university. To the best of my knowledge and my belief, this contains no material
previously published or written by any other person except where due reference is
made in the text.

Copyright@ 2013. Janti Swastyastu Ristiyono Putri and Danielle Donelson-Sims,
M.A

All rights reserved. No part of this thesis may be reproduced by any means
without the permission of at least one of the copyright owners or the English
Department, Faculty of Language and Literature, Satya Wacana Christian
University, Salatiga.
Janti Swastyastu Ristiyono Putri:

ii
PUBLICATION AGREEMENT DECLARATION

As a member of the Satya Wacana Christian University (SWCU) academic
community, I verify that:

Name : Janti Swastyastu Ristiyono Putri
Student ID Number : 112007065
Study Program : English Education
Faculty : Faculty of Language and Literature
Kind of Work : Undergraduate Thesis

In developing my knowledge, I agree to provide SWCU with a non-exclusive
royalty free right for my intellectual property and the contents therein entitled:

Status Class Exploitation In The Short Story Of The Short Happy Life Of
Conat
along with any pertinent equipment.
With this non-exclusive royalty free right, SWCU maintains the right to copy,
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This declaration is made according to the best of my knowledge.

Made in : Salatiga
Date : 19 Juni 2013

Verified by signee,

Janti Swastyastu Ristiyono Putri

Approved by:

iii
Status Class Exploitation in the Short Story of The Short Happy
Life of Conat
Janti Swastyastu R. Putri

Abstract
Many people believe that class division is a natural thing which they do not need
to be concerned about. Whereas actually class division can cause problems which
lead to exploitation within society itself, because class division draws a big
distinction between the majority and the minority. This study analyses a short
story, written by Indonesian author Mocthar Lubis, entitled The Short Happy Life
Of Conat. The analysis uses Marxist theory, particularly the aspects of ideology,
hegemony, and reification, to determine the ways in which The Short Happy Life
Of Conat shows how attitudes of superiority are expressed against minorities.
According to Marxist theory, society makes judgements about minority people
based on people‘s identities stemming from their class and treatment. This short
story gives examples of how lower class people are pictured as powerless and
unimportant creatures with this study concentrating on status and class
exploitations recorded. This study also shows how government and society should
be mindful of how they treat minorities; lower class people are not objects,
inferiors, or voiceless creatures.

Keywords: Mocthar Lubis, Exploitation, Conat, Marxism

1. Introduction

When I first read the short story of The Short Happy Life of Conat, written
by Mocthar Lubis, as part of my Prose class, I did not think that I was going to
use the story in the future so I just read it without thinking of what happened
behind the story and wrote personal opinions about the story for the weekly
journal. I never questioned the reason why the author wrote such a story or what
he was trying to tell the reader from the story. However, through the class
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discussion following our reading of the story, I received a lot of information about
the story and, when the teacher explained more about the story, I found myself
more interested in studying The Short Happy Life of Conat more deeply. The
teacher‘s explanation about the message is that society often treats marginalized
people unfairly because they are powerless, voiceless and they will always be
followers of the majority. This is clearly shown at the end of the short story, when
the ruler decided to save the minister and let the trishaw driver die because the
ruler assumed that the minister‘s life was more important than the life of the
trishaw driver.
The separation of the marginalized and dominant ones portrayed in The
Short Happy Life of Conat when understood through Marxist criticism, is an
example that the mistreatment of the poor is important; class struggle is
happening and will still be a big subject of concern in the future as well.
Regarding class struggle, we can see that the present state of Indonesia is evidence
that we are living in a country where the dominant people in the government live
in comfort, but the streets are filled with homeless people and people barely
surviving without enough money for them to eat. As seen from the history of
Indonesia, the poor have always struggled to live while the rich live in comfort.
From my perspective the subject of the distinct differences between the dominant
and the oppressed have been obvious in the past, present and are likely to continue
into the future. However, this analysis is important to help readers be more aware
of how important it is to treat others without looking at their class status or where
they come from in order to create a better society. Often people measure things by
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money, power and royalty or family connections and they rarely look at the
character and heart of others. If people only care about wealthy people, they will
only see objects or possessions, they will not see a person they can love.
The story of The Short Happy Life of Conat is a very engrossing story
because the author could have written about Soekarno or the other heros of the
revolution, but instead he chose the figure of Conat who is only a messenger and a
trishaw driver. Furthermore, the story of The Short Happy Life of Conat examines
social stratification which leads to exploitation. I will analyze how characters treat
Conat because of his class status. This analysis will make use of Marxist theory to
analyze the exploitation of class status. The classes are identified as two different
groups of people, the ruling class and the masses in the terms of power within the
society. I have made particular use the Marxist ideas of Ideology, Hegemony and
Reification to analyze the differing status of classes that led to the exploitation in
the story.

2. Summary of the Text

The Short Happy Life of Conat by Mochtar Lubis is a story of a 26 year old
- man named Conat who works as a messenger in the government civil service in
Jakarta and honestly earns 325 rupiah a month. Conat is happily married with two
children and his wife is expecting another baby. He realizes his current wages
would not be enough to fulfill his family needs, so he decides to work as a trishaw
driver in the afternoons. He works extremely hard, day and night, for three years
but no one bothers to ask him why he works very hard. Yet what would happen if
he fell sick. He sees everything as being determined by fate and nobody needs to
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be blamed for his situation. He completely trusts his nation‘s leaders and believes
that whatever they say is true.
One day, he goes to a mass rally with tens of thousands of other people. As
he listens to the speeches, he forgets about his life situation. Even after returning
to work and going home he is still stirred by the speeches. Then suddenly he feels
unwell. That evening he rides his trishaw and late at night he is hit by a car and
taken to the hospital. His wife is told to come back in the morning, but when she
comes back she finds out he had died. The blood that was to be used for Conat
had been used by a major dignitary instead who suffered an accident about the
same time as Conat.
3. Theory
Marxist Theory
A school of thought arising from the teachings of Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, Marxist theory, proclaimed that different socioeconomic classes have
more powerful effects in classifying people compared to differences in religious
beliefs, race, ethnicity, or gender (Tyson 54). As they perceive it, Marxist
theorists believe that economic power is the cause of all social and political
activities in a society. Money and the value of things become a motivation to what
a society regards as acceptable or valuable in all aspects of life. Marxist criticism
investigates how those in power within a society uses their governmental system
to hide unfairness in their socioeconomic arrangement. Therefore, another aim of
Marxism is to bring to surface the ideologies that hinder us from seeing the reality
of the class struggle beyond what is visible to us, by ―interpret[ing] text according
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to its relevance with the class struggle‖ (―History Marxist Criticism‖).
Furthermore, Marxist theorists have created a model of society that consists of ―a
base (the material means of production, distribution, and exchange) and a
superstructure (the ‗cultural‘ world of ideas, art, religion, law, and so on)‖ (Barry
157). It means that everything exists in a society is because of an important thing
called ‗money‘ as the ‗base‘. As a result, every part of society - from its social,
political, and ideological standpoint - exists or remains standing only because of
money.
Moreover, Marxism classifies two kinds of social classes: ―the
bourgeoisie—those who control the world‘s natural, economic, and human
resources—and the proletariat, the majority of the global population who live in
substandard conditions and who have always performed the manual labor‖
(Tyson, 54). The bourgeoisie are the rich and powerful controllers of a society,
whereas, the proletariat are the subordinate - poor citizens who live in oppressed
situations under the rule of their powerful government. Because of the presence of
two differing socioeconomic classes, there are bound to be conflicts between the
rich and the poor.
The system by which a society works is heavily influenced by ideologies.
As for all Marxists, ideology is a key term which, according to Althusser,
―represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of
existence‖ (Althusser 18). It also means that without having any ideology in a
society, the society would not be able to keep the governance systems focused on
what is right for all members of society. According to Bertens, ideology blurs the
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