Introduction T1 112007065 Full text

2 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 3 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 4 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