“A ‘Pushover’ Job” is not only haunting in its descriptions of forced labor, but also its description of a barren nature, subverting the common trope of the bountiful life-giving mother nature. Of course, in winter, very little things are green or alive. The story begins with a description of the color of the winter landscape, “The hills glistened white with a tinge of blue—like loaves of sugar” (21). Loaves of sugar act as a particularly odd simile estranging the natural landscape. Of course, a loaf of sugar does not exist, but this odd imagery of a collage of bread and sugar highlight the inability of nature in winter to be bountiful. As it would be normal to make a comparison of the natural world to food during other times when the woods are teeming in life, here the narrator has to stretch for an awkward and odd comparison.  Whereas the narrator is continuing to look at nature as bountiful, his impossible comparison begins to show the falsehood of that belief causing his simile to be gibberish.

This falsehood of the bountiful nature persists in the narrator’s pushover job of collecting needles for snake-oil like vitamins. The narrator is sent out to collect the needles of evergreen trees, the only green and outwardly alive plant in the forest in winter. The narrator and the other needle-pickers are quite literately destroying the signs of life from the winter landscape. Their actions are pointless in that the elixir made by these needles is useless and also that their work goes unchecked. Even without meeting the quota they are left unpunished and more importantly, regardless of their harvest, they remain unfed, their soup served free of the nourishing vegetables and meat. The only outwardly available bounty of nature in winter is useless. The pointlessness of the narrator’s needle-picking in both gain of the state and gain of himself begin to highlight the false conception that nature is bountiful. The value put on these trees in their supposed cure on scurvy and their break from hard labor for the narrator are both false and constructed myths. “A ‘Pushover’ Job” demonstrates the barrenness of the northern winter landscape and the blind attempts of man to recognize it differently.