Donald Barthelme, "The School", presentation by Kajo and Katarina

Humor:
Although the humor can be considered dark, it is present throughout the story and usually through escalation. 
- It normally begins with ordinary situations that anybody can recognize like a classroom gardening project but then it escalates to death and how to approach life values.
- The narrator's calm tone adds up to this theme because it never rises to a high pitch, and this monotonous way of telling the story actually makes it funnier in my opinion.
-  The narrator builds a large sequence of deaths so that the readers eventually find humor in death which is very unusual because death is normally a serious matter.
-  Starting from a tree, to reptiles and rodents, to puppies and finally to humans. One can say that there is a moral lesson in this story and it's that life is a school where we are supposed to learn and death is inevitable.

Elements of grotesque:
-  Story of death is told in non serious language.
-  The situation that should be traumatic is treated normally.
-  Role reversal in language: Teacher speaks like a pupil, children use formal philosophical language.
-  Elements emerge without a cause – deaths, philosophical question, Helen.
-  The situation that should be traumatic is treated normally which causes surrealistic/oneiric atmosphere.
-  One may argue that the story has neither a real beginning nor a real endubg. The reader may have a feeling that the end it is only another episode of the story that will be repeated endlessly.

Sense of time and post modernism:

- In postmodern literature time doesn't necessarily need to go in chronological order. This means that there can be flashbacks or distortions in time, and this is something that caught our attention in the story.
- The narrator talks about the snakes, and the Korean kid... etc and we don't know when exactly this is happening. No clear indication of when the action is happening.
- Later the narrator talks about a discussion they had “ONE” day in class. Again, this is very uncertain, and could be considered a flashback, as we don't know when the “ONE” day actually was.

Insecurity as a postmodern trait:

- Postmodern literature is often ambiguous and certain things are unclear. Insecurity is a present theme in this short story, I get a sense that the narrator might be doubting himself very often. Sometimes there are questions or issues present in the story but the narrator doesn't know the answer or has a very ambiguous answer. An example of this is the language used in the story, such as “I don't know” or “You know what I mean”. 

Language:
-  Using colloquial language causes a sense of disbelief.
-  Narrator plays with decorum, switching from informal to formal language.
-  Way of expression of the first-person narrator may be taken as directly addressing the reader, or as an inner dialogue with hitself.