Richard Barhelme The School Sparknotes

When stuck in a seemingly endless loop of death, face to face with it at every waking corner, the only way for some to move forward is to block out emotion and numb the pain by looking past it. Think for a second about doctors who experience death on a day-to-day basis; is it wrong for them to block out emotion and put their own mental wellbeing before empathy? In Donald Barthelme’s short story “The School,” first published in 1974 in The New Yorker, an absurd amount of deaths occur in a narrow timeframe, all of which pertain to a classroom’s pets, plants, even students and their family members. After countless tragedies, the students suddenly bombard the teacher with deep-rooted questions concerning death and the meaning of life. A story consumed with as much death and confusion as “The School” would be classified by Arthur W. Frank as a chaos narrative. In his book The Wounded Storyteller, published in 1995 by the University of Chicago Press as a collection of illness and suffering stories, Frank describes the chaos narrative as one who’s “plot imagines life never getting better,” where characters are lost in the midst of a …show more content…
After the first few classroom pets die, the students seem to care less for the subsequent deaths, marking the class’ transition from the restitution narrative to chaos narrative. In “The School,” death is thrown at the students from every angle, so quickly that they don’t have time to mourn each passing because something or someone else is sure to die soon after. However, with the accumulation of so many deaths, the students reach a breaking point where they feel compelled to peg the teacher for answers and