Week 12: Alejandra Garcia

Donald Barthelme’s “The School” is a fast paced, frantic, and interesting piece. The story follows the narrator’s stream of consciousness, as he recalls various deaths at school. At first the deaths are rather humorous: thirty orange trees, some herbs that might have been overwatered and snakes. However, as the narrator continues the death of students and family members are brought up. The story moves from a set of coincidences to something much darker. At first I believed the students to be young but in the last part of the story they begin to question live and death and ask for the narrator to make love with the teacher assistant because they needed “an assertion of value.” Their language diverted heavily from that of normal young school children. However, by this point in the story it is clear it is not a normal school.