Yesterday in class we examined Donald Barthelme’s “The School” as another potential subject for your analysis. In groups of three and four, you and your classmates considered these elements.
- The narrator and the narrative voice
- Conflict
- A short passage that strikes you as interesting, revealing, or strange
The Narrator and the Narrative Voice
The words and phrases you and your classmates used to describe the narrator, Edgar, and his voice include “awkward,” “casual,” “detached,” “emotionless,” “lack[ing] empathy,” “mixing humor with unease,” “mono[tonus],” not “filter[ing] any of his thoughts.”
Do any of those descriptions seem at odds with the narrator’s words and actions? If so, what might account for that discrepancy?
Conflict
Most of the groups addressed the existential conflict of life versus death. The children want the plants and animals in their classroom to live. They want the Korean orphan, Kim, to live; they want their classmates and relatives to live, but the children are repeatedly faced with death.
A couple of the groups addressed Edgar’s internal conflicts. On group observed that he could not explain death to them because he was trying to protect their innocence. Another group noted that Edgar could not broach the subject of death because of his uncertainty as well as the absurdity of the circumstances: the unbelievably large number of deaths.
Another group pointed to the death of the trees–perhaps due to poor soil–as a particular instance of the existential conflict.
Interesting, Revealing, or Strange
Most of the groups noted the childrens’ request for Edgar to “please make love with Helen” (11) as a strange line. Other lines mentioned include “You know what I mean” (8), “As soon as I saw the puppy I thought, Oh Christ” (9), “And then there was this Korean Orphan” (9), and “is death that which gives meaning to life?” (10).
In this post, I am not including your sentences that demonstrate why those lines are interesting, revealing, or strange, but we will address some of those next Monday when we revisit Barthelme’s story. Remember that they are “triggers for analysis” (Rosenwasser and Stephen 24). That is why your journal assignment from yesterday asked you to repeat the interesting-revealing-strange exercise with the text you have tentatively chosen as the subject of your analysis.
Works Cited
Barthelme, Donald. “The School.” The Best American Short Stories 1975, edited by Martha Foley. Houghton Mifflin, 1975. pp. 8-11.
Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. “‘Interesting,’ ‘Revealing,’ ‘Strange,'” Writing Analytically, 9th edition. Wadsworth/Cengage, 2024. p. 24.
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website, the Merriam-Webster Scrabble Word Finder page, and review the blog posts devoted to Scrabble.
Jane Lucas 