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[Y]ou remember, the boiler was shut off for four days because of the strike. I mean, none of their parents would let them cross the picket line and they knew there was a strike going on and what it meant.
After saying that the snakes in the school had died, the narrator attempts to explain. The narrator is ambiguous about who he means by “you,” but he assumes that whomever he’s addressing (the reader?) knows the history of what happened. Therefore, he does not provide details about the strike. However, his reference to a strike strongly implies that the school has had troubles beyond the deaths of the orange trees and snakes. Furthermore, the school children show a remarkable awareness of what has been happening: they apparently understand the strike’s meaning, while readers are left in the dark.
I don’t know what it died of. Distemper, I guess. It probably hadn’t had any shots.
The Murdoch girl finds a stray puppy under a delivery truck and brings it to school. After some fun times, the puppy dies without warning. This quote demonstrates the narrator’s limited knowledge. Since the narrative point of view is first person, readers know only what the narrator knows or what they can infer from the details he supplies. In this case, the narrator does not know why the puppy dies. He only hazards a guess: distemper. Distemper is a highly contagious, fatal disease. However, it is easily preventable with vaccinations. From this vantage, the narrator’s feeling that the puppy “hadn’t had any shots” may be correct.
However, the signs of distemper include fever, lethargy, vomiting, and diarrhea. The narrator gives no impression that the puppy showed these symptoms. Although he expects the puppy to live for only two weeks, he gives the impression that the dog was fine one day and dead the next. So, it is highly unlikely that the cause is distemper. The narrator’s uneducated guess makes him somewhat unreliable. In addition, the narrator absolves himself and his students of blame in the dog’s death. If, as he suggests, the dog died because it was not immunized, the death was inevitable.
The cause of death was not stated in the letter we got, they suggested we adopt another child instead and sent us some interesting case histories, but we didn’t have the heart.
Not long after the class adopts a Korean orphan, the child dies. Again, the narrator cannot explain the death, other than to say, “maybe we adopted him too late or something.” The fact that the charity agency did not state the child’s cause of death suggests an assumption on the charity’s part that donors might consider such details unimportant. Like all deaths in the story, this one seems unremarkable. The agency’s suggestion that the class adopt another child also implies that orphaned children are plentiful and replaceable.
The idiom “we didn’t have the heart” is a curious choice, suggesting contradictory meanings to reflect the emotional confusion the event might inspire in the class. On the one hand, not to have a heart suggests that the kids may be heartless, lacking the compassion to adopt another child despite the need. On the other hand, “didn’t have the heart” suggests that the kids are not willing to adopt another child because they are emotionally exhausted and fear the possibility of the child ’s death.
Then there was a knock on the door, I opened the door, and the new gerbil walked in. The children cheered wildly.
After the teaching assistant Helen embraces the narrator and he kisses her brow, the children are excited. The moment is broken by a knock on the door, after which a gerbil enters the classroom. It’s notable that Edgar refers to this creature as “the new gerbil,” a phrase that suggests the replaceability of gerbils. That is, when one gerbil dies, it’s easy to replace it with new one. This notion of replaceability echoes the adoption agency’s letter offering the class to replace Kim, the deceased orphan, with a new one.
However, the strangeness of this scene goes beyond Edgar’s reference to a new gerbil. Are we readers supposed to believe that the gerbil is the one who knocks on the door? How did it get there? Furthermore, are we readers meant to take the new gerbil as a symbol for something? Does it represent a renewal of the life and death cycle that has appeared throughout the story? As for the children’s cheers, are they just excited to have a new class pet, or are they indulging in an absurd celebration of new life in the face of death’s inevitability? Barthelme leaves it up to us readers to answer these questions for ourselves.
