This short episode contains a discussion of the work ethic in the camps. Clearly, the system is designed to make the prisoners keep each other working hard in order for the whole group to survive. Tyurin has assigned the Captain and Fetyukov to work together carrying sand because that particular job does not need intelligence; here, we should realize that Solzhenitsyn is being satiric: the Captain has been a Navy officer and Fetyukov has been "a big shot" in a government office.
The work makes the men animated, and they even joke about what they will charge for doing such an excellent job. For awhile, Ivan works with Gopchik, a young Ukrainian whom he likes, and time passes very quickly as they prepare for the bricklaying ahead. After one of the very few, directly sarcastic comments about the Soviet government — which has decreed that when the sun is directly overhead, the time is 1 P.M. — Ivan has to undergo some good-natured ribbing about the fact that his ten-year sentence is almost up, which leads to his reflecting about the reason for his being in this "special" camp.
In this episode, Solzhenitsyn deals with the old question of why prisoners work so hard — rather than doing sloppy work or even sabotaging some of the work projects. In this particular scene, we see that the work quota system has been designed so that food rations are tied to the fulfillment of the assigned work. Thus, each prisoner is anxious for all of his gang members to work hard, because he is the beneficiary of the results and will suffer if, due to a lack of effort on the part of any single gang member, the work quota is not completed. The work quota, however, only encourages quantity, not quality of work.
