The School, D. Barthelme, excerpt text analysis

This excerpt of the short story can be divided into two parts. In the first part the students ask the teacher questions about death; what happens after death, what death means, and how one is to react to it. The second part begins with the introduction of the character Helen, the teaching assistant, whom the students ask the teacher to make love to.
The entire excerpt is marked by a mock-dramatic structure, as the prose is laced with markers of dialogue. ‘they said’ and ‘I said’. What is most striking about the dialogue is the escalation of the register of the discussion, especially in the “lines” spoken by the students. In their first question, in which they ask where all the dead plants, animals, and people go, they use very childish, low-register diction; such as ‘the poppas and mommas’. But the escalation of the register is very noticeable. As, just a few sentences later, the students are asking about death ‘as a fundamental datum’ and how the ‘mundanity of the everyday may be transcended’. The rapid transition of register from low to high (from familiar, affectionate, childish terms to words denoting deep, abstract concepts, even the Latin loan-word ‘datum’) is a bold, direct treatment of the ideas that have been underlying the short story thus far: questions of death and its significance.

It is as if the students cease to be merely students. The story has been escalating in its surreality: the narrative has progressed from dead plants to dead children and family, and now the time for reckoning has come. The climax of the narrative sees the readers’ key questions unabashedly thrown their face via the mouthpiece of the chorus of students. The introduction of Helen is like the chorus, the collective, demanding an offering; in this case, a ritual, the demonstration of lovemaking. The ‘assertion of value’ that the students demand is the assertion that ‘life is what gives meaning to life’. So love, the making of love, and the propagation of that which gives meaning to life, serves as a sufficient conclusion to the counteract the enumeration of death.