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“The School” explores the implications of human awareness of mortality, employing humor that functions through a tone that shifts rapidly between comic and tragic. This shifting tone emphasizes the narrator’s struggle to accept the absurdities of existence during his search for an outlook on life that resists an acute awareness of death. This effort and narrative pattern, as it moves from descriptions of the deaths of plants to those of animals to those of people, draws readers into the narrator’s struggle as well.
The story opens with descriptions of deaths that, from a human perspective, aren’t particularly tragic. Edgar begins by describing the deaths of trees. Since readers may not have much emotional investment in plants, these incidents set a light tone. They are, at best, an irritation for Edgar and a disappointment for his students. Subsequently, Edgar mentions the death of the classroom snakes. The absurd result of a strike, the snakes’ passing doesn't evoke much sympathy, not even from the children.
Throughout the rising action, Edgar continues to describe a sequence of deaths that, though similarly non-tragic, grows increasingly ominous. This sequence begins with the death of the herb gardens, which Edgar thinks died due to overwatering. The garden’s collapse may have been caused by accident, though Edgar also entertains the possibility that someone intentionally sabotaged it. This idea of sabotage introduces a darker note that continues when Edgar relates another set of deaths: the class gerbils, white mice, and a salamander all suffocated from being carried in plastic bags. Again, readers cannot know with certainty if these deaths were accidental or intentional. The deaths make little sense, and the story’s tone grows more unsettling and absurd.
The mood turns lighter when the next animals to die are tropical fish, which Edgar says “was no surprise.” Barthelme uses hyperbole to humorous effect, saying that the fish die if “you look at them crooked.” The humor here briefly suspends the story’s increasingly ominous tone by pointing at the absurdity of requiring standard lesson plans. The death of the fish isn’t mysterious; it’s a predictable, annual event. It’s absurd, then, that teachers like Edgar must keep teaching a unit on fish every year. The point here is, therefore, less focused on death and instead emphasizes the bureaucratic elements of education.
With one sentence, however, the story’s tone then gets decidedly darker: “We weren’t even supposed to have a puppy.” Readers share Edgar’s dread when he says, “Oh Christ, I bet it will live for about two weeks and then . . .” By now, both the narrator and readers can predict what will happen. Both are likely to feel an emotional pull for the puppy, a stronger urge to deny its mortality than they have felt for any of the preceding plants and animals. The puppy’s youth connotes innocence, playfulness, and loyalty. To further imbue the tale of the puppy with emotional impact, Barthelme describes the children’s joy while playing with it. When the inevitable happens, Edgar hides the death from his students. Nor does he think too much about the fact that his students named the puppy after him. By avoiding too much thought about the death of Edgar the puppy, he can avoid thinking about his own death.
The story’s tone grows even darker when the deaths begin to include human beings. The first is a Korean orphan that the class “adopted” through a humanitarian agency. Kim’s death remains a mystery, and in an absurd twist, the agency offers another child, as if Korean orphans are expendable and easily replaced. Next come the deaths of family members. Parents die in grisly ways, yet they are tallied quickly, as if they do not matter. The deaths of grandparents are dismissed as relatively normal, but Edgar notes that the number of these deaths seems higher this year. The classroom’s greatest tragedy then comes when two classmates die in an accident. But rather than dwell on the emotional impact this tragedy has on his students, Edgar focuses on a court case and the legal challenge of determining who is at fault for the boys’ deaths. At this point, the mounting death toll seems almost laughably absurd. Even so, the reader sympathizes with the children and their growing sense that something may be wrong with their school.
At the story’s climax, the narrative makes a significant tonal shift when the students ask Edgar where dead plants, animals, and people go. Edgar doesn’t know. Nobody knows because death is unknowable. The students continue to ask very adult questions about the meaning of death and its effect on an understanding of life. The absurdity of children using words and ideas incongruous with their ages takes the edge off the seriousness of the exchange. Edgar’s inability to give a definitive response shows that human beings do not know the answers. Even so, we feel compelled to search for them. The pursuit of answers, perhaps like life itself, may therefore be absurd. The responses of the children—“we don’t like it” and “it’s a bloody shame”—may be the most reasonable responses to questions of mortality that human beings can manage. Edgar, the narrative’s adult representative, seems to agree.
In the story’s fast-paced falling action, the tone shifts back into a comic mode when the students ask Edgar to make love with Helen so they “can see how it is done.” They want an “assertion of value,” or a demonstration that life indeed has meaning, something independent of the inevitability of death. It is absurd that children would ask this, and even more absurd that Edgar and Helen would even consider it. When Helen embraces Edgar and he kisses her forehead, the children become excited. Readers might also feel excitement at the sexual potential or awkwardness of the moment.
But the tense moment is broken by the story’s punchline: there is a knock on the door, and the new pet gerbil enters the classroom. The children cheer wildly. This ending is at once absurd and ambiguous. We readers don’t know why the new gerbil is there, or what its appearance means. Is it a sign of hope? Or does the animal, given what’s happened to classroom pets earlier, simply represent a renewal of the same tragicomic cycle of life and death that appears throughout the story? If so, do the children’s cheers represent an absurd celebration of life in the face of death’s inevitability? Readers must answer these questions for themselves.
