postmodernist ideas
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About 600 wordsPostmodernist Ideas 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 my imagination, postmodernist
stories differed from the classical ones in the arrangement of the ideas
and in the standard that postmodernists reject society. True, "The
School" does differ in composition, for example the absence of
introduction, but though it sounds somewhat comical, it does also have
an incorporated pessimism that makes me reflect on the story. I think this
pessimism is the cause that postmodernists reject society. The notion
of rejection comes in the story through the death cases. It seems strange
why Barthelme uses the notion death in his story, but I think the reason is
that this is the best way to stress that every living thing is losing its
importance. Hopeless pessimism interweaves with the idea of rejection,
and I find them together everywhere, in every death case. For
Barthelme, what is lost is unrecoverable. Pessimism, mostly expressed
in taking death naturally, spreads uniformly all over the story, from the
first paragraph about the orange trees to the last when the new gerbil
enters the classroom. In this school, where the children are supposed to
receive education, everything dies. The fish, the salamander, and the
orange trees die though children take much care of them. The teacher is
pessimistic although life goes on and a new gerbil walks in the school.
Edgar says that "life is that which gives meaning to life," but still this does
not change that Edgar knew that the puppy would die in two weeks. He
had seen worse when some parents died in a car accident and when two
children died while playing with each other in a dangerous place. What
else, but pessimism, could one expect in an environment where every
living thing, including children, is dying? Death's dominance in the
story shows again that society, which presumably should foster the
growth of the future individuals (i.e. children), destroys their very
existence. By the end of the story, it is easy to understand that death is
the destiny of the children as well, because it would be impossible for
them to live in an environment (commonly known as 'society') where
parents (symbol of wisdom) die. It is impossible to live in an environment
where the teacher himself is aware that whatever living creature, like the
puppy for example, that enters the school (a social institution) will
eventually cease to exist. At this point, I become certain that "The
School" is a demonstration that pessimism drives postmodernists. As
Barthelme stresses in the second to last paragraph, death is a close
companion of life. The very adjacency of death with the kids, who do as
well symbolise life as they are at the very beginning of it, proves my point.
The writer seems, besides other things, to question the very nature of
existence. One should remember the closing paragraph where the kids
ask the teacher whether death gives meaning to life. The answer he gives
is that life is what gives meaning to life. One could justly ask: why is the
story full of images of death then? Because the story seems to be a
sketch of the society, which by breeding death (death in the symbolical
sense: death of the ideas, joy, identity) prompts the postmodernists to
reject it.
