The Lambert family, protagonists of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, see the world through a lens that places monetary value on people, objects and actions. Money is a constant presence in their lives, whether there is enough of it or not. Alfred, Enid, Gary, Denise, Chip, and other characters seem to exist only in relation to someone or something outside of themselves. They seem to evaluate their worth based on that someone or something. The traditional ideal of family interaction becomes a series of transactions, as the Lamberts communicate coldly through a wall of imaginary currency; built to protect their emotional vulnerability. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Each member of the Lambert family is appreciated for his or her occupation in the family company. Enid chooses her husband, Alfred, because he is a "earner" and "intend[s] to be comfortable in life as well as happy" (265). When she first meets Alfred, Enid studies Alfred's outer packaging, which she sees as a product. He concludes that Alfred's clothes "...were themselves richly pleated woolen beauties." (265). Enid bases its value on the evaluation of its packaging. Finally, when Alfred is admitted to a nursing home, Enid admits that she only ever wants his body. He is her investment and she notes that “his life… bore an uncanny resemblance to the lives of those friends of hers, Chuck Meisner and Joe Person in particular, who were 'addicted' to tracking their investments… but she was the same way with Alfred: painfully attuned to every hopeful recovery, always fearful of a breakdown” (470). Enid's hopes in life are materialistic and so she constantly watches her investments to measure her own success and worth. Throughout the novel Enid obsessively compares herself to people, especially friends, in terms of class or money. Like Enid, Gary, their eldest son, also identifies Alfred with his work. Gary sees Alfred, who works for a railway company, as "...forever on the verge of derailing as he staggered down the corridors...the old iron horse was careening towards a crash, and Gary could hardly bear to look" (171). As Alfred's health deteriorates and he can no longer work, Gary's value to him diminishes and he ponders whether Alfred's life still has meaning when he asks, "Shouldn't this train run on these tracks?" (171). Denise points out to her brother Gary his unrealistic view of their father: “It's just as much of a fantasy to act as if Dad were a ratty old car. He's a person, Gary. It has an interior life” (211). Denise's view of her father is more human. Gary responds to her with, "If he wants to sit in that chair and sleep his whole life, that's fine... But first, let's get that chair out of a three-story house that's falling apart and losing value" (211). His concern is completely financial. Gary's father is "falling apart and losing value" and instead of processing this fact and dealing with it emotionally, Gary focuses on the declining value of the house to create emotional distance. Franzen continually incorporates psychology and economics throughout the novel, suggesting an entanglement, demonstrated through the Lamberts as unhealthy and detached. Enid's anxieties about Alfred's worth are revealed when she compares Alfred to "...a wad of money hidden in a mattress...rotting and devaluing" (276). As Alfred ages, his health worsens and he loses the ability to work and be the "earner" that Enid had invested in. Enid's "Alfred shares" collapse whenhe refuses to buy a certain stock that they both know will make money. Because Alfred is a "wad of money...in a mattress," Enid must wage a marital mattress battle in an attempt to persuade her husband. The mattress is a shared privacy property. Usually, Enid is on one side, sobbing herself to sleep, and Alfred is on the other, seeking refuge in dreams. Enid observes that "...a depression in the heart ha[s] withered him [Alfred]" (276). The Depression era shapes Alfred's outlook on finances and leaves him "withered," or financially helpless and unable to take risks. Alfred also suffers from chronic depression and this leaves him almost incapacitated and emotionally helpless. Enid must deal with the effects of both types of depression on her marriage: the “heart” (270). He decides that Alfred is a “…bad investor. But she [isn't], and in bed with him, "she was known...when a room was very dark...to take a real risk or two" (276). Enid sees contact with her husband in bed as a financial risk. As she attempts to manipulate her husband with oral sex, she asks suggestively, “We could have a little extra money in the bank, do you think? Take the kids to Disneyland. You think?" (276). After a few seconds, Enid's bet disappoints and Alfred, uncomfortable with Enid's familiarity and assertiveness with money, rejects her. To feel dominance, Alfred then forces her to have intercourse with him. When it comes to money, Alfred doesn't live up to Enid's expectations, but his constant suggestions only serve to remind Alfred of his inability to achieve Enid's financial worth 'inside the house. His "alchemical laboratory under the kitchen contained a Maytag with a wringer swinging above, twinned rubber rollers like enormous black lips. Bleach, bluing, distilled water, starch. the patterned knitted power cord” (265). This “workshop” where Enid keeps her tools, is similar to Alfred’s workshop in the basement. She is a worker like Alfred, only with a different job hardworking, who distracts herself by collecting meaningless junk and working in her laboratory. Her professional training develops “during and after the Depression” where Enid “learns many survival skills” (265). She believes in a false reality of work and consumption: the American dream, to keep herself distracted from feelings that are perhaps too traumatic or too difficult for her to handle. Franzen writes, “elective ignorance [is] a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest” (265). Enid preserves herself by looking at the world with “elective ignorance” and not accepting the reality behind the financial facade she adds to it. Franzen compares Alfred and Enid's son Gary's marriage to a cash register in which "love and goodwill" are deposited and spent. When Enid insists on spending a family Christmas in her Midwestern hometown of St. Jude, Gary's wife, Caroline, is adamant about not going. Franzen writes, “their marriage treasury no longer contained sufficient funds of love and goodwill to cover the emotional costs that going to St. Jude entailed for Caroline or that not going to St. Jude entailed for him” (191). Christmas at St. Jude is an “emotional cost” rather than an opportunity to see family. Furthermore, Gary agrees to go only if his parents agree to consider selling their house so that Gary does not have to worry about taking care of them in the future. He is willing to spend Christmas with his parents only if they accept the exchange. Although Gary and Caroline have serious marital problems and appear to be in constant competition for thepower, Gary is unable to divorce her because he is afraid of the financial consequences. . He “…allowed himself to imagine that he was divorced. But three bright, idealized mental portraits of his children, darkened by a horde of bat-like fears about finance, drove that idea from his head” (202). Behind the glossy “portraits” or packaging of his children, Gary hides a bad anxiety about finances. Fear motivates Gary to protect himself from emotional pain by viewing his relationships as financial interactions. Like Enid, Gary sees his children as products he creates and his marriage as a business venture that he hopes will be profitable. Franzen emphasizes a certain logic that many people subscribe to in the text: money makes people intrinsically different. When Denise visits Austria, she meets Enid's richer friends from St. Jude Klaus and Silvia. Klaus speaks of St. Jude's “false democracy” and the popular belief that there are no “class differences,” “race differences,” or “economic differences” (390). All of these differences come down to economics and achieving the American Dream. The dream is supposed to be available to all people who work hard enough, but that's not the case. The people of St. Jude pretend there is equality. Klaus states that he doesn't remember meeting Enid some Thanksgiving, because "everyone pretends to be the same" (390). Immediately afterwards Silvia exclaims: “Isn't champagne wonderful? Really different! Klaus and I used to drink it drier, but then we found this and we love it” (391). Klaus adds, “There is such a snobbish charm in the dry” (392). The difference between people – money – is prevalent in the way Klaus and Silvia see the world. They will definitely point out the “wonderful…really different” champagne they serve Denise. However Denise notes that "Klaus takes a bottle from a silver pail and pours Sekt with a flourish" and observes "the Sekt [being] sweet and too carbonated and remarkably similar to Sprite" (390). For Klaus and Silvia, money makes things intrinsically superior, but in reality the difference is meaningless or non-existent. Denise, the chef, fails to detect the “wonderful” difference in their champagne. Like Enid, Klaus and Silvia are doing exactly what the people of St. Jude do, but instead of pretending to be the same, they pretend to be inherently different. They insist on the presence of their differences because this allows them to feel a false superiority in the world. But the universal human struggle transcends all socio-economic boundaries, making all people equal in some respects. Chip awakens to this reality after his traumatic experiences in Lithuania. He goes with Gitanas, a criminal warlord who promises Chip money. Chip feels a brotherly bond with Gitanas (who looks like him), and Gitanas sees Chip as a "... valued employee, a vulnerable and delightful American, an object of amusement, indulgence, and even mystery" (438). For Gitanas, Chip is an object, a product, a way to make money, a hard worker. Although Chip needs money the most, he, like Denise, tries to see the world without the capitalist lens through which the other Lamberts view them. Gitanas' struggle to reconcile his capitalist beliefs with those of his country parallels Chips' struggle within himself to reconcile his inherited beliefs with his theoretical beliefs. “How Lithuanian we all felt,” says Gitanas, “when we could point to the Soviets and say: no, we weren't like that... No, we're not free market, no, we're not globalized, that doesn't make me feel Lithuanian . This makes me feel stupid and stone age. So how can I be a patriot now?…What is the positive definition of my country?” (444). With Gitanas and Lithuania, Franzen shows a push inother parts of the world to emulate and resist concepts like the American dream. Chip frequents spas in Lithuania seeking sexual release and “with each premature ejaculation he sheds another ounce of the hereditary shame that had endured fifteen years of prolonged theoretical attack. What remained was a gratitude that he expressed in the form of one hundred percent tips” (438). Chip's venture into the “theoretical” world of Marx and Foucault is an “attack” on his Midwestern capitalist heritage. Chip is able to expel his "shame" because he brazenly pays for release. Once the shame disappears, the theories he has “resisted” for so long begin to take hold permanently as part of his worldview. When Chip returns home for Christmas, “the Midwestern road,” his parents' road, “strikes the traveler [Chip] as a wonderland of wealth, oak trees, and evidently useless space. The traveler did not see how such a place could exist in a world of Lithuanians and Poles” (536).Chip becomes an outsider, a “traveler” in the land where he grew up. The Midwest's ideology of financial competition is shattered when it recognizes the real opulence and wastefulness of middle-class American life compared to war-torn places like Lithuania and Poland. Chip acknowledges that “the fact that power did not simply cross the divide between such divergent economic tensions was evidence of the insulating effectiveness of political borders. It seemed like a mirage. It seemed like an exceptionally vivid memory of something loved and dead” (536). This memory concerns the capitalist ideology he believed in, which Enid, Alfred and Gary still consider intrinsic. Alfred considers allowing himself to drown and escape this ideology when he falls from the cruise ship. He thinks of the “objectless world of death” and the “universe of nonbeing” that lies waiting in the depths of the cold, dark water (426). The "orange flotation device" thrown at him, he thinks, "would be a GOD in the objectless world of death... It was his last object and so he instinctively loved it and drew near to it" (426). The object reminds him of his very existence. If death is a place of nothingness, life is a place full of objects to which it attributes meaning. With this scene Franzen highlights the way objects are used to define people in the text. People use the objects around them to define who they are; they relate to their objects. Alfred hopes: one day "...he [might] wake up transformed into a completely different person with infinite energy and infinite time to tend to all the objects he had saved, to make everything work, to keep everything together" ( 462). The objects are Alfred and if he is capable of taking care of the objects, and therefore of himself, he can exist. Without taking care of these items, Alfred will cease to exist (462). He reflects on this and says "out loud" to himself in the basement, "I should damn well throw it all," (463). This allusion to suicide is present throughout the novel. Once pulled aboard the ship and out of the freezing water, Alfred “reconsiders the wisdom of surviving” because the crew “treats him like a child” (463). He doesn't want to live if he can't maintain his privacy and take care of himself, the same way his items in the basement ask to be taken care of. Alfred is the object in Enid's life that she related to, and once he is gone, her anger and judgment towards the world diminishes. Because she feels less burdened, Enid is free to exist without the broken, depressed, and emotionally unavailable object that is Alfred. It is only when he visits Alfred that he becomes depressed. Despite this, Enid does not shatter..