Beginning of Essay
Barthelme's "The School" is the first postmodernist story I have ever read. When I read it for the first time, my lips formed a bitter smile. In my imagination, postmodernist stories differed from the classical ones in the arrangement of the ideas and in the sta ....

Middle of Essay
.... taking death naturally, spreads uniformly all over the story, from the first paragraph about the orange trees to the last when the new gerbil enters the classroom. In this school, where the children are supposed to receive education, everything dies. The fish, the salamander, and the orange trees die though children take much care of them. The teacher is pessimistic although life goes on and a new gerbil walks in the school. Edgar says that "life is that which gives meaning to life," but still this does not change that Edgar knew that the puppy would die in two weeks. He had seen worse when some parents died in a car accident and when two chi ....