The Prize themes

An overall theme to me from The Prize is: how oil production made the world what it is today…
To divide this concept up into 3 main categories I’d say 3 themes are: greed/power; economic growth; and connections.

Many of the characters in The Prize had characteristics of greed. With the discovery of oil, along came the want for power. Everyone wanted land to drill. The search for new land was a big deal. Any new discovery brought everyone a step closer to more products such as clothing, heat, and machines. Oil meant money and money meant more power. For politics, if you had oil in your land, you had power. Countries would pay to have your oil shipped to them. If any country had trouble, a recurring event in the book was war. Countries declared war on each other whenever there was an oil issue. One major part of the power theme is that countries would use oil as a weapon when in war. It was the start of war and then it made it worse by being used as a weapon. Countries would threaten other countries to block their oil supply trades. Just to look like big shots, countries would use oil as something to hide behind. Because of oil and the negative impact on the globe, life became less simple and more about how to get more supply that we rely on so much.

Oil production meant economic growth. As a society, everything expanded. Because of oil, we were able to heat homes safely and not use coal; create cars and use oil for gasoline; more oil companies were discovered and rapidly grew in numbers right away and their building sizes grew; roads and highways were built to get to other cities for goods and services. Gas stations were founded and soon were on every corner in towns. The gasoline market became huge and is the base of advertising, logos and publicity around the world. Suburbs in America were a big part of the growth that America went through. Suburbs and highways changed the way we lived. Traveling was now an option. Residents were no longer standing still in their town, they could move somewhere else. Another reoccurring event in the book was converting the globe’s usage from coal to oil. It gave many reasons why oil was better than coal and the process countries went through to convert.

The third theme of The Prize is connections. I think the book made a great point about countries connecting for goods and services because of oil. The trading industry flourished when we started to rely on each other for oil land. Because of relying on other countries, we had more reason to use transportation to other countries.