Barthelme's "The School"

I think the most effective element Barthelme employs in this work is the narrator’s voice and tone. The teacher, our narrator, refuses at any point to fully commit to any one thought or opinion, repeatedly using ellipses and such phrases as “you know,” refusing to give us anything concrete. While we certainly would not refer to this form of recounting and story-telling as objective, we nevertheless do feel as though we are getting a relatively genuine viewpoint. At no point in the reading did I feel like he was skewing the facts for any reason; I believed what I was being told. Instead of seeing these deaths as tragic, or deserved, or horrific, or any of the other countless emotions that could be applied, the narrator is instead simply jaded. We feel that, unlike his students, he has experienced enough death to see this string of fatalities as an existential coincidence. Were he not forced to deal with death in the sense that his students look to him to help them understand, his tone could have just as well been used to describe the weather or the daily grind of rush hour. Though we may accuse our narrator of being apathetic, at no point do we find him to be untrustworthy.

I would almost describe this form of narration as stream of consciousness. This is obviously not true in the strictest sense; it does not feel like one never-ending rant full of random one-liners and observations. However, I feel like so much death has occurred that the teacher has in some sense checked out, not wanting to deal with it anymore. He has allowed his brain to turn on and observe, but he refuses to engage it. As I have already said, this gives us a genuine view of the happenings of the story. It also conjures a vivid-yet-dreamlike image of the story, one in which I can completely buy school children talking like English and philosophy grad students, the narrator’s orphaned thoughts embodied in them despite their respective ages and maturity levels. The same goes for the gerbil arriving. In the narrator’s mind, it makes no difference whether or not it knocks on doors and walks in like a Disney character.

I am sure that in some ways the teacher is the epitome of the unreliable narrator. The argument could be made that he is indeed so scarred by death that he is seeing and hearing things that are not really there. However, as a reader, I took the noncommittal narration to be a brilliant tool that allowed me to experience things objectively, albeit through the narrator’s eyes.