"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.