A Look at The School by Donald Barthelme Essay

Barthelme's "The School" is the first postmodernist story I have ever read.When I read it for the first time, my lips formed a bitter smile. In myimagination, postmodernist stories differed from the classical ones in thearrangement of the ideas and in the standard that postmodernists reject society.True, The School does differ in composition, for example the absence ofintroduction, but though it sounds somewhat comical, it does also have anincorporated pessimism that makes me reflect on the story. I think thispessimism is the cause that postmodernists reject society.The notion of rejection comes in the story through the death cases. Itseems strange why Barthelme uses the notion death in his story, but I think thereason is that this is the best way to stress that every living thing is losingits importance. Hopeless pessimism interweaves with the idea of rejection, and Ifind them together everywhere, in every death case. For Barthelme, what is lost is unrecoverable. Pessimism, mostly expressedin taking death naturally, spreads uniformly all over the story, from the firstparagraph about the orange trees to the last when the new gerbil enters theclassroom. In this school, where the children are supposed to receive education,everything dies. The fish, the salamander, and the orange trees die thoughchildren take much care of them. The teacher is pessimistic although life goeson and a new gerbil walks in the school. Edgar says that "life is that whichgives meaning to life," but still this does not change that Edgar knew that thepuppy would die in two weeks. He had seen worse when some parents died in a caraccident and when two children died while playing with each other in a dangerousplace. What else, but pessimism, could one expect in an environment where everyliving thing, including children, is dying? Death's dominance in the story shows again that society, which presumablyshould foster the growth of the future individuals (i.e. children), destroystheir very existence. By the end of the story, it is...

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