An evolution in Goerge Saunders's style

Note that George Saunders's story Escape from Spiderhead in his collection Tenth of December is another story of heroic action - albeit in the entirely weird way that heroism evolves in a Saundes story - but it seems that at this point in his career he is evolving and moving away from the outsider-loser characters that populated his earlier fiction and developing characters with deep flaws and peculiar mentality who overcome these conditions to achieve a moment of grace. Spiderhead perhaps the best example - a pretty long story (Saunders has published a few novellas, and one that if I remember right was expanded for inclusion in a collection) about a man, apparently a prisoner in on a murder charge who is allowed to do part of his sentence in a controlled drug experiment - he seems to be working for an upstate NY pharmaceutical giant with strange overtones - perhaps it's actually a government agency? (in Kafka it would be; today's terror is corporate control rather than government control - or at least was until recently); all of the subjects wear a MotiPak (one of several TM names throughout the story) that carries an assortment of Rx, which the experimenters can release at various times - always preceded by a voice-over comment: Drip On, to which subjects respond "Afirmative." In this experiment, Jeff meets a young woman in a room; they are each flooded with a Rx that makes them fall instantly and passionately in love; when the drip stops, they are puzzled and a little ashamed. Experiment repeated with another girl. Then, Jeff goes into the control center, Spiderhead, and has to choose which girl will receive a potentially lethal dose of a horrible Rx. Essentially, he refuses to choose and administers that Rx to himself, an act of suicide. Wow, does this sound ridiculous in recounting it! Who would want to read this story? Sounds like a comic book at best. And yet - Saunders's spooky tone and his capacity to get right into the character's interior monologue make this story strange and compelling. Is it an allegory in some way? Obviously we all use Rx in some format - caffeine, alcohol, recreational drugs, mood-altering drugs - which change our behavior and relationships. How different is this from this conspiratorial pharmaceutical giant willing to kill people in an experiment in order to produce a Rx that will help people "who love too much or too little"? Interesting to compare Spiderhead with another Saunders story in the collection, which is one of his prototypical loser stories - a fictive version of characters that often remind me of Ricky Gervais in the original Office: idiots who think that everyone else things they're smart and charming.