"The School" Review

Barthelme’s short story, “The School,” is a very creative and thought provoking piece of literature. There is an intensity that builds through the story, an intensity developed through language and images and even the abstract events that happen in the story. I liked how Barthelme built each paragraph around the theme of death. In the beginning small things die. As the story continues bigger objects experience death. The entire story builds on death and the truth that whatever happens at this “place” ultimately ends in death. I spent the entire story waiting on a true tragedy and even when the narrator beings to tell us about a tragedy, I find it not enough “tragic” for my taste. I mean, with all the death in the story, you’d think Barthelme would add in something really devastating. But he doesn’t add the devastating and I’m actually happy about that. I like that the story keeps me on pins and needles about something tragic happening but in the end it levels off momentarily only to be once again interrupted.
Where the ending fits into the story, I have no idea. The gerbil appears just as quickly as the story ends but resonates longer with the reader once the initial reading process has ended. Though one could argue that the gerbil only adds to the abstract and weird nature of the story, I say it distracts everything the story had built. Until the gerbil enters the story, there had been some what of a concrete development of plot. The appearance of the gerbil throws the rest of the story aside and in the end all you can wonder is, “Where does the gerbil fit in?” Is it a good thing for an author to work the entire story only to have the reader not remember or acknowledge anything other than the “gerbil” once the story ends? This is the first story I’ve read that completely throws out the normal development of plot and characters. Once reason I think this story works is because it is short – very short. Had I been taken on a long four or five page journey about the school only to be caught off guard by the gerbil, I’d probably not want to revisit the story. Barthelme doesn’t really get to a specific point in his story but leaves it open-ended. He leaves the story so that the no matter how much we hate to admit it, we – the reader - want to know who the gerbil is, why it’s put into the story, and how, if it be possible, does the gerbil relate to the other tragic, and crazy, images in the story.

"The School," Donald Barthelme

I like Barthelme's "gas stations" of elevating the joke from plants to animals to humans and making blacker and blacker humor as the story progresses. However, as Saunders points out, your audience becomes very aware of the pattern, so you cannot stay on one path too long, which I feel he did when he mentioned the two kids in his class dying. There's nothing significantly different between that gas station and the last - they were both about humans. And then he does it again in the next paragraph, mentioning that someone's father was killed. He should have quit while he was still ahead.
Why are these young kids tackling existential philosophy with collegiate vocabulary? If he wanted to make the kids really smart, he should have introduced that idea earlier in the story. It was distracting where it was.
Now that I think about it, I could accept the smart dialogue from the kids if this story is about the kids gradually growing up. They learn about death and how cold and indifferent the world is when they are young, and it becomes more and more painfully obvious for them as they get older. So the kids are young adults when they start asking the questions. And the gerbil represents a reversion to childlike innocence and enthusiasm about life.
I also like the rhythm and repetition of the dialogue ("I said, yes, maybe - they said, we don't like it - I said that's sound). I also like how the dialogue was not in quotation marks, so it feels more like the author is trying to tell me a story. I also like the way the author tries to explain away all the deaths, as if to suggest that death isn't mandatory. To me, the last line is a punchline with a meaning behind it. The gerbil is, of course, not only subject to death, but according to the rules of the story, will die soon. So it's only a quick fix. Perhaps the author is suggesting love and reproduction are our only vindications in the face of death.