In encountering
George Saunders, we enter a world starkly different, yet at the same time
alarmingly similar, to the one we live in. We may not all work at a creepy
place called CivilWarLand and speak to ghosts there, we may not work at a strip
lunch restaurant while also dealing with a deteriorating (literally, physically
falling apart, in this case) dead aunt, and I’m pretty sure none of us live
with an alarmingly bizarre sister and hope we find the strength to kick her
out, so that we can finally start our lives. In this sense, sure, Saunders
introduces some absurdism into his work. However, this absurdism has its feet
solidly set in reality. This is what sets Saunders apart, in terms of writing
style. He brings the reader in by introducing us to very human situations. In
the narrowest sense, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” “Sea Oak,” and “Winky” all
share a certain desperate tone. All of the characters are fucked up, to put it
mildly. But, they are not fucked up to the point of being unrecognizable. In fact,
they are all quite recognizable because of their very human desires. The narrator
in “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” just wants to make money for his family to
survive on. Sure, we realize he is letting a lunatic run around killing people,
but this doesn’t change the fact that he is just a man trying to make ends
meet. Our narrator in “Sea Oak” is working at a strip joint, but he, too, is
doing it out of desperation. He seems like a smart enough guy, but this the
only work he can find. But, then, his aunt dies and comes back to haunt him. Is
she a ghost? No, not in the sense that the McKinnons are. Rather, she is much
more of a zombie, come back to instruct her family how to live. And do they
listen? Sort of. Finally, “Winky” is a bit different from the other two pieces.
In this story, our character is much more reasonable, I suppose one could say.
Here, we are not presented with any dead people walking around, but we are
still sure to see some bizarrness. First of all, this self-help seminar is
extremely strange in the way it is set up. But, it is unlikely? No, it
certainly is not. In the end, Neil is trying to survive, just like the
narrators in the other pieces. However, his survival is not necessarily based
on money. Rather, his based on living to the fullest extent that he can’t. His
strange sister is limiting him; she is holding him back, so to speak.
Naturally, in the end, all three of these stories do not end particularly well
for the main protagonists.
In summing up
George Saunders, we can call him an absurd writer, who has a strong
understanding of humanity and how fucked up it really is. Moreover, people are
not happy and rarely get what they want or even try to get what they want. But,
that doesn’t have to be a problem, now, does it? We’re all just trying to get
by, after all.
I really enjoyed all of George Saunders stories! From beginning to end, I was in the story ready to read the next absurd detail that he made realistic. Somehow, I was able to accept an aunt back from the dead, a ghost family, and a seminar where they tell you to ditch loved ones if they are bringing you down. Saunders uses very specific details to create these larger than life characters that seem oddly familiar. I can see Winky, Bernie, Min and Jade, and Sam as real people I could meet and have met before. Each story creates layered characters who we get to know throughout the story. By the end of each story, I know everything about these characters from careers, future ambitions, and religious viewers. Saunders truly knows the basics of story telling so well he goes beyond.
ReplyDeleteIn “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” the reader meets a narrator who can’t seem to keep everything together. Everything is falling apart around him from his career to his family life. Everything seems to pick up when a special ops named Sam gets hired. The readers end up cheering for Sam because he is defeating the “bad guys,” but there is a hint of something wrong going on in the story. At the end, Sam is painted in a bad light as he kills the narrator. The supernatural element of the ghost family, the McKinnons, adds to the eerie atmosphere. It also almost foreshadows the narrator’s death since he seems to be the only one to interact with the ghost family. No matter what, the narrator in this story can’t win. He must face his mistakes as he recalls everything he was, could have been, and Sam’s future as he dies in the last paragraphs of the story.
“Sea Oak,” is the perfect setting for the dysfunctional family living dangerously in a dangerous neighborhood. None of them seem to be trying to escape until Aunt Bernie dies and gives them all a kick in the butt. At first, the reader might question whether Bernie is really back, but as they read on, Bernie becomes very real. She becomes what is needed to potentially get the family members to want something more than what is given to them.
“Winky” was the most normal of the stories. The beginning of the story gets confusing as a play is shown in which one of the actors in labeled, “You.” This confused me into actually taking it as Saunders writing to me! This feeling shakes off as we go into the story, but leaves an unsettling feeling. The reader gets to see the point of view of Winky and the point of view of Neil. Both have totally different viewers of their relationship. This creates a tension in the story that made me feel for both characters. At the end of the story, we find out that Neil never sticks up for himself and Winky remains oblivious to the tension her brother feels. Neither could communicate with the other.
George Saunders! You hear that? That’s the name of a man who will gladly turn the world on its head for your reading pleasure. You want to read something absurd and hilarious? You want a story with real and understandable characters? If you want the best of both worlds, Saunders is the man you want to see. “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” starts off well enough. Our narrator is desperate to keep his place of employment up and running for the sake of his kids while struggling with a difficult marriage. You could have a doom and gloom story and leave it there, but where’s the fun in that? Saunders adds extra flavor to this story with a sociopathic gunman hired to the job to “take care of” threats to the park, which he does too well. Things escalate from there as the narrator’s anxiety continue to increase, weighing his soul against the financial security of his family as the story gets more bizarre, but still human. “Sea Oak,” on the other hand, starts out with an odd situation that takes an even stranger turn halfway through the story. However, don’t let the oddities fool you; this isn’t simply surreal for the sake of surrealism. Within the humor and absurdities is the real heart of the story: a dysfunctional poor family that realizes it needs to get its act together. Sure, the one sane man works as a stripper, his sister and cousin are hyperboles of dumb freeloaders, and it takes their zombified aunt to whip them into shape, but these factors in no way detract from the quality of the story. Besides, haven’t we all had at least one weird week in our lives?
ReplyDeleteI feel as though “Winky” being placed as the last of the three stories was a good move on the editor’s part, as this is where the absurdities most clearly bridge up to reality. Tom Rodgers’s Seminars are really silly, even if they do come to a legitimate point. Then again, such seminars that occur in the real world can also be really silly, and even drive at less legitimate points. However, Saunders gives this event a stronger perspective on reality than we would have gotten from such a seminar in real life. Rodgers makes a somewhat selfish idea seem entirely reasonable and noble (and in some circumstances, it really is), but despite Neil feeling so strongly about what he learned, he can’t go through with kicking out Winky, as it isn’t really that easy to betray someone you know so well, and for the brief amount of time we get to see things from Winky’s side of the story, it makes the more human side of this silly situation feel better and more palatable. If you were expecting Neil to make Winky cry before giving in, sorry kids, that’s just not good enough for Saunders, because what’s “real” isn’t what’s “realistic” and expected. Reality is the weirdness you don’t expect.
I think I enjoyed George Saunders’s stories because they seemed to all represent the realities of life. A reality where not only is ones future undecided, but life, is just plan, hard, unfair and fucked up. We also see in each of these stories, characters that are willing to do it all in order to provide food, and shelter for their family, whether its being a dancer, or letting a man run wild killing people. Out of all these stories “Sea Oak” was my favorite. The idea of Aunt Bernie coming back to life, though it seems unrealistic, was so very real to me. It made me really question what one would do if they had a chance to come back and tell their family how to fix their situation. At the same time though I think Saunders was trying to make a point. We only have one chance at life, we need to go out and fight for what we want, whether that’s money, or to keep ones family safe. Bernie gives the family faith, and direction, she is not longer enabling them to sit on their asses and hope that one day they will survive the wild ride of life. The fact that Bernie falls literally apart, why trying to piece her family together made me realize that she couldn’t have the best of both worlds. She was somehow able to come back and warn them about the future, yet the more she told and helped, the more she fell apart. I love the way that Saunders was able to write about this “ghost, like zombie”, yet I never once questioned it. Of course it does seem absurd, its not like this is something we can all say we’ve witnessed, yet I believed it all, in fact I wanted it to be very real, and in the story it was. “Maybe it happens all the time. Maybe there’s angry dead all over, hiding in rooms, covered with blankets, bossing around their scared, embarrassed relatives. Because how would we know? (987)”
ReplyDeleteIn “Winky,” we get to see the dynamic of all theses people sitting around a room, with such stance and attitude. The concept of being at a self-help seminar was funny to me, mainly because I think we all need some self-help now and then. I liked the way Saunders set up the narrative, though I have to say I found it confusing in the beginning. Its third person point of view limited and I really think it brought me closer to the character of Neil. Neil also deals with family holding him back, in this case his sister. I think this shows that although family may come first and be the ones we turn to, it may not always be best to surround ourselves with them forever, or daily.
In “CivilWarLand In Bad Decline”, I saw again the struggle of class and wealth, which is something Saunders writes about in all three of these stories. Money, isn’t necessarily want makes one happy, yet in order to survive and keep themselves safe, it’s what they have to work for. It’s the vicious cycle that everyone must keep up with. In the end all theses characters want to do is survive and live.
George Saunders has a way of making the most bizarre and strange situations seem real and human to us. They are ridiculous and nutty and out of this world; but that is one of the things that stands out to us as avid readers and writers. Beginning with “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline”, we are faced with the harsh reality that is a theme park becoming broke and unable to continue, due to gangs destroying property and attempting to hurt people. The narrator and his boss end up hiring an ex-soldier, who begins killing gang members and high school aged kids who tried to steal candy, and unfortunately a lost group of children who thought they were bird-watching. Saunders mixes in ghosts to this already wacky story, giving us a mixing of genres that keeps our attention, up until the narrator himself becomes a ghost in this soon to be ghost town of a theme park.
ReplyDelete“Sea Oak” is so wrong in so many ways (and that isn’t a bad thing). We have the perfectly dysfunctional family that is able to stay in one piece due to Aunt Bernie and her organized ways. Our narrator works as a stripper type waiter in a restaurant, and he is the only other person in his family supporting the children and the women he lives with. Aunt Bernie’s death occurs, only to have us read her back to life. It’s hysterical and sickening to watch Aunt Bernie threaten that he must make more money and see her fall into pieces by the end of the story. Aunt Bernie dies a second time within a matter of pages. Thank goodness that this doesn’t actually happen… or does it?
Last, but certainly not least we meet “Winky”. The story and character have an odd tone to begin with, who calls a person Winky? Neil Yaniky wants to remove his sister from his life, because she is too much for everyone to handle, including himself. He builds himself up at a workshop in order to ask her to leave his apartment, only to chicken out. In a perfect story, this man would have accomplished his goal; however, no life is perfect. He continues on to live with his sister, Winky, who is too much to handle, because our main character realizes that he is a weak man.
Saunders made these unlikely situations human and relatable, while keeping the humor wrapped into the story. Did I mention that I am so happy he will be visiting campus next spring?
George Saunders has been my favorite writer so far. I think it’s just his creativity, and how he comes up with one really bizarre situation and stretches it from there, so that in the end I’m sitting there amazed at how he came up with such wild ideas. In the middle of the absurdity, though, is the realization that there are stories here, not just the genius of a mind running rampant. These stories are refreshing to read—they are hilarious and sad at the same time. For example, in “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” Samuel kills a bunch of bird-watchers mistaken for a gang (969), and the narrator has a conversation with a ghost on the hood of his car: “He says that even the heavens have fallen into disrepair. I think about explaining smog to him but then Evelyn pulls up” (965). I could go on and on here. The tone of this story is what really gets me. If there was a specific story where as I was reading, I was mindful of our class discussion about taking one sentence at a time, it is this one. I can almost picture Saunders chuckling to himself as he wrote.
ReplyDelete“Sea Oak” was almost too bizarre for me. Aunt Bernie goes from “hunky-dory” (973) to dead woman disintegrating with every move she makes, her head fallen off and her arms sitting in her lap like two old bread rolls. Like Aimee Bender discusses in her introduction, Saunders is so clever with creating a wacky, funny situation that also carries some serious weight. The narrator who works at a strip club, who is living with two parents who feed their kids “a mush of ice cream and Hershey’s syrup in their bottles” (979), is actually part of a discombobulated family that is trying to save up enough money for a new home. In “Winky,” Neil attends a seminar led by Tom Rodgers, a man who persuades him that he will find Inner Peace by getting rid of the person who has crapped in Neil’s oatmeal (metaphorically speaking, of course). Underneath it all, we have a familiar but difficult scenario: how to kindly tell a family member that we each have our own oatmeal, and that that person needs to really back off before the whole familial bowl flips over. We have to dig deep, underneath all the humor and creativity, to find these hidden meanings. But because of that, Saunders gives us a fresh take on what it means to interpret and write stories.
George Saunders certainly combines the real with the absurd. While reading “CivilWarLand in Decline”, the situation was certainly odd but I actually had to double back when it came to the point where the family of ghosts was introduced, just to make sure that I had actually read what I thought I had read. Beneath the story of ghosts and a mad man killing teens, is the story of a man desperate to keep his job in order to keep his children happy. Without the inclusion of the family of ghosts and the killer, I don’t think this story would have been nearly as interesting. But, at the same time, those absurd details don’t take away or distract from the story either. At its heart, the story is about desperation and, at the end, failure.
ReplyDelete“Sea Oak” is absurd from the get-go. I’ve never heard of a strip lunch joint before, but it is in one that the story drops us at the very beginning. Like the previous story, this story is also about desperation, though the characters seem to take a more blasé approach than in the previous story. It gets even more absurd when the dead aunt becomes a zombie. It just makes you stop reading for a moment and go, “did that just happen?” The aunt is changed in terms of her personality and immediately begins ordering around the siblings in order to enable them to improve their situation. The family dynamic between these characters is absurd and the story behind the absurdity is that they need to get their act together and actually work to improve their situation, even if that means doing things they don’t like and don’t want to do.
“Winky” was an interesting story to end on, as it seemed to be the least absurd of the three stories. It was by no means lacking in absurdity however. The seminar Neil attends is odd in the way it functions, but I’ve heard of weirder self-help seminars before. That, combined with the crazy sister, is what makes the story absurd. I expected the ending and the failure of Neil to kick his sister to the curb. If he had yelled at her and kicked her out, that wouldn’t have been believable. Even in his absurdity, Saunders stories still feel as if they could actually happen.
I don't think I've ever laughed so hard at a set of stories then I did with these George Saunders stories. I don't know if that was intentional or if I just have a very macabre sense of humor, but I had tears in my eyes I was laughing so hard.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite of the stories would have to be “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.” We have a man whose life is slowly falling apart, similar to how CivilWarLand is also falling apart at the seams. His family life and work life is slowly disintegrating into nothing. Then the main character goes and hires a man who originally kills one of the gangs running around the park, and then proceeds to kill any kids who stray off the path. Saunders also throws in the supernatural element to mix up the story by adding in the family of ghosts that the main character can talk too. We watch this mans life fall apart until he becomes one of the ghosts of the theme park.
“Sea Oak” had just as much of the absurd in a story. We had a very dysfunctional family in one f the most dysfunctional neighborhood ever. Then the only sane person in the house, Aunt Bernie, dies before she could truly live her life, and then she comes back from the dead to kick their asses and make them actually live their lives. Though Bernie tried in her life to keep her family together, it is irnic that she only succeeds after literally falling apart.
In “Winky,” we get to see the dynamic of all theses people sitting around a room, with such stance and attitude. I was a little confused when I was reading this one at first because due to the way it was written, I thought it was written in the second person, or that Saunders was actually talking to us. We realize that the main character is a weak man, one who builds up the courage to kick his sister out of his house, but chickens out at the end.
I have always had mixed feelings about absurdities in fiction. Sometimes I have absolutely no patience, and sometimes I find it absolutely hilarious. Usually though I just smack my palm against my forehead and think “how could this ever happen, and why does no one realize how messed up this is?” This is how I felt about George Saunders’ stories. Each had differing degrees of absurdity, but all of them really made me wonder about the world the characters lived in. It certainly couldn’t be our world. No one in our world would kill a kid for threatening someone with a butter knife. (Really though? A butter knife? Goodness that’s a messed up world.)
ReplyDeleteI’ll start with “Winky” since it’s the least absurd of the three stories. We have Neil who wants to have a better life, and, with some advice from some guy at a seminar, decides that his problem stems from the fact that his sister won’t move out of his house. First off, I personally found the seminar really strange. The guy pushes off taking care of his handicapped brother to someone else and is proud of himself for that? Where’s the kindness in his heart? Neil is like the girl the seminar holder talked about though. Winky had been pushed onto him, and out of the kindness of his heart, he let her live with him. Now she’s strange, but from the section about her, she seems genuinely kind hearted. Though, Neil feels like his troubles are because he has to take care of her. I’m sure Ellen felt the same way when Gene was pushed on her to take care of. In this world, the heartless succeed, and the kind-hearted will always be kept down by their burdens. Depressing.
“CivilWarLand in Decline” has a medium level of absurdity when compared to all three stories. The narrator works at this place, which is being terrorized by gangs. Just gangs. Nothing more specific than that. So, the boss wants to hire someone to keep the gangs in their place, but this guy just ends up murdering people for the silliest reasons. Again I say, a butter knife, really? Oh also there are ghosts. The entire story is littered with absurdities: people overreacting, wives who seem awful for no reason, not thinking that giving a guy a loaded gun will probably have consequences. It’s silly, we laugh, and then we realize how awful this scenario looks. I certainly felt sorry for the narrator at the end. He was just trying to do his job and do what his boss said, and everything fell apart.
“Sea Oak” is the most absurd, angry zombies and all. Again we see a guy who is having life issues. He works at a strip joint while his absurdly stupid sister and cousin sit at home taking care of their kids and basically doing nothing else. Their Aunt Bernie’s a sweet, kind hearted woman who slaves away at DrugTown to help make ends meet for the family. Unfortunately, the day comes when Aunt Bernie dies, but she doesn’t stay dead for long. She comes back as a very very unhappy zombie and starts ordering everyone else around. Of course, she’s trying to get them to live a better life, starting with getting them out of the old apartment, though the methods aren’t exactly 100% honorable. The narrator is ordered to do illegal things to make enough money for the family. Life goes on, the plan doesn’t go as planned, and Aunt Bernie eventually falls apart and dies again. But, with the fear that a horrible fate will befall Troy someday, the narrator does what Aunt Bernie asked, even if it’s sleazy. He too wishes for a better life for everyone, so he tries to carry on what his aunt tried to do in her last moments after her last moments.
Three pages into "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" I realized that if George Saunders and Wes Anderson teamed up they would have a ball. George Saunders' writing style can only be described in my mind as "quirky as hell". It was a lot of fun reading these stories, and I've come away with a lot of favorite lines. But George Saunders is doing something incredible here: he's harnessed the absurd in such a way that his stories leave the reader believing them for every second. The characters are people we swear we've met. Even with the ones we see little of, we get little peeks into their lives so that it feels like Saunders has created complete, real characters. He leads us through a story with near-constant humor, and at the end drops the serious bomb. When I read "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" I was expecting a ridiculous ending to match the rest, but I came to it and I finally understood the entire story. What's great about his use of the absurd is that the reader never expects what comes next; it's always new and fresh and you keep with it for every moment, never getting bored or distracted. I really enjoyed these stories, and I'd really love to get my hands on some more of his work. I could read George Saunders for hours, easily.
ReplyDeleteFrom what we’ve seen so far of aburdism and surrealism, it is clear that George Saunders tries something a bit differently with his writing. His version of absurd, arguably magical, storytelling strikes even deeper into our understanding of how stories should be. Saunders takes reality and adds so many unrealistic factors into each story that I feel we delve into another dimension with him.
ReplyDeleteLike with “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline”, it takes place at a theme park that is more or less constantly terrorized by gangs in the area. It gets so bad to a point that a church the owner moved there is set aflame, as well as holding up and kidnapping visitors. Not only is that almost beyond belief, but they also hire a former special ops soldier that was discharged for “participating in a bloodbath”. So here we have a Civil War theme park that basically hires Rambo for security. Sam, on the first day of the job, kills the entire six-person gang that’s been recently harassing them, and then goes off to stay in the woods. When tried to be gifted actual food, he denies and says he’s just fine leaving off berries. The other crazy element that Saunders brings into this story is that the protagonist can see and interact with a family of ghosts that haunt the park, the McKinnons. They act as a sort of advisory characters for the narrator, while also being affected by how chaotic things in the narrator’s life are going. The park is failing, his marriage is falling apart, foreboding sense of danger steadily grows. With his demise, the entire story to me sounds like a supernatural horror thriller, and Saunders defines his characters to a point that I want to believe all of it.
Even with “Sea Oak”, which has the leader of a highly dysfunctional family die and then brought back to life is still reasonable to me. The low point that Saunders places this family allows me to believe anything he throws in. The male of the family strips and waits table for a living at an extremely critical venue, and his sister and cousin are trying to study for their GEDs and they don’t know how many sides a triangle has. There are details as well that help Saunders get away with stories like this. The females keep watching these horrible TV shoes that focus on such atrocities as children killing each other off. That is television in this world that he created. So with this atmosphere of a story, having a zombie halfway through the story is not too far-fetched.
After stories such as these, “Winky” sounds calm compared to them. These ambitious self-help seminars sound oddly commanding, almost like a cult. Yaniky becomes convinced that his sister is who is filling his life with turmoil and stress. The story itself is tame, but the general mood amongst the characters is so off-putting that I, again, feel that this is from the normal world.
George Saunders, what a different style of writing. I really enjoyed all three of theses stories were fun to read although some of them did drag on a bit for me, but that was OK because I found myself getting increasingly interested in the stories especially the "CivilWarLand," which was ok, but I found it to drag on a lot more then the others.
ReplyDelete"CivilwarLand," was an interesting story especially since it was about a failing company that reenacted civil war scenes and history as well as maintained a canal. The gang violence was interesting, but I found it a little distracting and I wasn't sure how it really, motivated the story it almost seemed like an after thought.I also wasn't really a fan of the main character, but i enjoyed the story as a whole.
"Sea Oak" what a story probably my favorite I found it a little confusing, but because of the way Saunders sets this up I believed it no matter, what. I found the Information that was given about the sister and cousin quite funny and the boy in the story seemed to have a pretty unusual home life. That is really why I like this story a lot more than "CivilWarLand" because I could except this. It was harder to except the first story.
"Winky" was the least strange and more kind of grounded story. For that reason I was less interested in it, but it was still good and the details that were used were great. The character of Yaniky believes that his sister is the one ruining his life and it gets very interesting.