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| Drawing by Austin Kleon |
Want to hear George Saunders talking to Susquehanna and Widener students in February, 2011? Listen here on YouTube.
You can also see him talking on Letterman and Charlie Rose.
Hold on to your party hats: Saunders will give a reading at Susquehanna in the spring of 2014.
FYI: He teaches in the MFA program at Syracuse University.
George Saunders had a way of really getting to me when I was reading his stories, particularly “The Barber’s Unhappiness.” At first, the thought of a middle-aged man who would make up fantasies in his head including strangers who he didn’t even know made me feel strange. But Saunders wrote this piece in a way that by the time I reached the middle of the story, I felt so much sympathy for the barber. The fact that the barber was that alone made me feel even more in tune with the story. Even the way it was written stood out. It seemed to me that the narrative wasn’t coming directly from the barber’s mind; but that someone was taking what he was thinking and writing it all down.
ReplyDelete“I Can Speak™!” was also extremely interesting as it was written in the form of a letter. I cannot say I enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed learning about the life of the barber; however I appreciated the fact that Saunders did write a story and fit into a “short” letter. Here creativity played a large role, in making the narrator the man writing the letter. I also didn’t even consider Mrs. Faniglia, her son Derek, and the narrator’s son Billy characters until I began writing this. This letter is giving us an unexpected story with characters and personalities.
I agree with Sydney that "The Barber's Unhappiness" certainly started out weird for me. The beginning of the story is him seeing a woman walking down the sidewalk and then devising this elaborate fantasy involving them both after only having just seen her for the first time today. Overall, the story felt very stream of consciousness for me. Especially the parts during which we hear about the barber's fantasies. I thought that was an interesting tool and it made sense. After all, we were experiencing the barber's thoughts, and they actually read like thoughts. He'd think one thing which would lead him into another thought.
ReplyDeleteThe second story, "I Can Speak!" was very interesting, if not my favorite of the two. It was extremely creative, and I appreciated that I was still getting most of the story even though I was only reading one side of the conversation (a single letter). It's not like anything I've ever read before so it was interesting to see how Saunders accomplished it.
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DeleteWhile reading "The Barber's Unhappiness," I found myself with mixed feeling towards Mickey, the Barber himself. At first Saunders gives the reader such a great description of the Barber's lonely life with his mother. We vividly see how bad he wishes to be with someone. He has many day dreams/ fantasy. So at first I feel sorry for him. I then however start to get kind of aggravated with him. The Barber has a way of dreaming about these beautiful women and how wonderful his life with them would be, but then he picks them apart. Gabby, he explains is so beautiful and she likes him, and she kisses him, but then he talks about how big she is and how they must fix that. For being so aware of his own faults (not having toes, and a little gut on him) he surely doesn't miss any opportunity to pick apart others misfortunes and most of these are due to appearance. He seems sort of vein to me. By the end of the story he lost my sympathy.
ReplyDeleteWhile reading "I Can speak" I found myself laughing. I really liked the way Saunders told a story through the form of a letter. The subject was comically to me. If I was reading it correctly this company makes masks for babies to wear so they can pretend to talk and be something they clearly are not. Yet the whole time the narrator Rick Sminks, is explaining how he and his company care about children . The line where he says "We at Kidluv really love what kids are, which is why we want them to become something better as soon as possible." They love kids but they don't want them to be kids sitting in the corner saying Blah Blah Blah. Thats what kids do!! I mean really Saunders is obviously making a statement here.
Saunders' stories both gave me an eerie feeling. At times during both of them, I wasn't sure if the narrator was being truthful to me. For example, during "I Can Speak!" I wasn't sure if the writer of the letter was being truthful about all the events and people he put into his letter or if he was just a bored employee and was writing down whatever came into his mind. For me I'm not exactly sure which is more bizarre.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing that stood out for me, Saunders' characters are almost a reverse of O'Conner's characters- he creates very unlikeable characters, that ultimately we end up sympathizing with. The Barber's a pretty terrible guy- he's ridiculously vain and obsessed with sex to the point that it's almost all he can think about, and judges the most of the women he encounters based on how good they look and how good a time in bed he believes they'd have. However by the end of the story, I was rooting for him, I wanted him to be able to get together with Gabby and have a happy life.
The thing that stood out to me the most in Saunder’s story, “The Barber’s Unhappiness,” is the characterization of the barber himself. Saunder creates the character for the audience by allowing us to enter the barber’s mind and see how lonely he is. The way that he argues with himself inside his head over how he feels about Gabby shows his indecisiveness, and almost his desperation to find someone to be with. Also, his interactions with his mother show how much pressure he is under towards his love life, as well as how much his mother guilt trips him. There were definitely parts in the story where I felt a little bad for him.
ReplyDeleteWhat I appreciated the most about “I CAN SPEAK” is Saunder’s use of humor. As I read the decriptions of the product and what it does, I could easily hear the voice of an annoying traveling saleman or an overly excited auctioneer running through my head. Just the description of the product itself is completely laughable.
YIKES! I don’t know what to think of this barber guy. He creeps me out with his fantasizing every two seconds, but he doesn’t have toes? Is this a joke? If not, I have some sympathy for him I guess. Saunders writes effectively, though- his run-on sentences (starting with the very first paragraph) characterize the barber as someone who is completely tangled up in his thoughts. Also, the driving school scene where the instructor asks questions like “did anyone know many g’s a person pulled when he or she went through a windshield at eighty miles per after hitting a bridge abutment or cow…” made an ordinary scenario funny by including ridiculous dialogue.
ReplyDeleteSaunders seems to have a knack for parodying ordinary situations. In I Can Speak! ™ the idea of a child crawling around all day with this device on his or her head left me shaking my own head throughout the entire story. This text reminds us of how greedy consumers can be that they would mask their child’s face in order to “speed up” the learning process. Saunders is also playing with the idea that “the world is at our fingertips” with dialogue like “And, because we do not want anyone to be unhappy with us, we would like to give you a complimentary ICS2100 upgrade!”
Both of these stories were comical in a somewhat bizarre way. In “The Barber's Unhappiness,” what made this story interesting is that, while we understand this man is middle-aged and single, it felt more like he was a teenager. All of his thoughts about attractive women and even creating scenarios where things go wrong sounded like an awkward teen who's trying to get laid. I understand that Saunders probably wanted to convey that idea that he was childlike; from living with his mother to getting boners thinking about girls. I do agree that I lost sympathy for him as he seemed somewhat critical of women's appearances yet had some physical flaws of his own. Not only being chubby and balding, but the toes alone should be enough to suggest he isn't judgmental at all. Still, I liked the story and how the ending unfolds.
ReplyDeleteWhile “I CAN SPEAK!” was different and shorter, I enjoyed it as much as the first story. Again, this story was bizarre but really funny. This sounded like something you would see in a fake commercial on a sketch comedy show. And as mentioned in other posts, I do like that we get a sense of the characters even though this is in the form of a letter. I like that these stories are very diverse from one another and showcase the range of Saunder's writing. Saunder's has a way of writing that makes me very engaged and intrigued throughout which is the best thing I can say about a writer.
What I enjoyed most about “The Barber’s Unhappiness” was the way that Saunders helped the reader understand the barber as a character directly through the barber’s thoughts. I found the barber’s constant over-analyzing to be amusing yet irritating at the same time. In the beginning, I was hoping for the Barber to end up with Gabby, but towards the end I wasn’t as sympathetic towards the barber, when he was criticizing Gabby for being “big.” Like Karen said, I enjoyed how Saunders took the ordinary setting of a driving school and turned it into a humorous situation with dialogue like “Now on the overhead the cartoon man’s body parts were scattered and his car phone was flying up to heaven on little angel wings.” In “I Can Speak!” I liked how Saunders was able to show the character of Rick Sminks through the language he used in the letter to Mrs. Faniglia. To me, Sminks was portrayed as an overbearing salesman. It was interesting yet frightening to imagine such a ridiculous invention as the I CAN SPEAK!
ReplyDeleteBoth of these stories were definitely unique from other stories that I’ve read. Beginning with “The Barber’s Unhappiness,” my favorite thing about this piece, and this might sound creepy considering he’s usually fantasizing about women during these scenes, was when the barber would imagine what was ideally going to happen (kind of like the end of “The Beauty Treatment”). An example of this is even in the opening of the story when he imagines about the woman walking into the church and suddenly judges her to have been knocked up.
ReplyDeleteI also really enjoyed “I CAN SPEAK.” It was very unique and I enjoyed the humor and cleverness of it. It’s especially funny because, as I read further, I realized how ridiculous this product was. It wasn’t all just humor, though. Saunders was still able to characterize both the writer of the letter and its recipient very well throughout the letter. We learn about both character’s families, for example.
George Saunders is fantastically unusual and I love that about his stories. They are intensely well written yet weird and sad and humorously dark. I think his style is so unique because he is consistently invested the whole way through. He isn’t afraid to show us the absolute worst of his characters (pretty much anytime Mickey’s alone in his room or in his thoughts), yet he never gives up on them, at their bleakest. Both times that Mickey stands up to his mom about going out, to the bar and to the date, I was cheering. Sure when he gets to Gabby his negative thoughts are churning as usual but he still goes over to her; he doesn’t turn around and walk away. Saunders leaves us on a cliffhanger ending. We don’t know if they end up together or even if he ever comes to accept her for her size. But who knows, maybe she is someone who is willing to give in to Mickey’s superficial needs, maybe she’s a bit of a pushover. Saunders hasn’t actually told us much about her besides that she’s shy and has a head half the size of her body, but the fact that she showed up to his shop and he showed up to his shop and they are about to enter together is a hopeful enough sign for me.
ReplyDeleteOh man, “I Can Speak” is one of my favorite stories. The amount of background information this sales representative can include in a simple follow-up letter to a customer is impressive, and not only about the woman but about himself. Saunders does it with humor and skill, so that by the end we can hear the desperation in his voice when he says he doesn’t need the commission of her sale when we know he absolutely does. Also just picturing the “I Can Speak” baby mask is terrifying. I always like imagining what kind of society/future world these kinds of inventions would be commonplace in. I’m impressed when an author like Saunders can make an invention like the baby mask seem almost normal (at least through the tone of a letter).
I was fascinated by the way Saunders develops character through speech in the two stories, especially in "I CAN SPEAK!" where actually, there is no speech, since it's one long letter. I read this story more closely than the first because it's essentially a long monologue in the form of a single letter, so seems like a great writing challenge. The detail, given right at the beginning, that he is writing during his lunch hour (whether or not the character is telling the truth) allows Saunders to blur the lines between professional and personal self - since lunch hour is the personal time during the work day - to develop the character more fully. With more time, I'd like to go back to look more closely at Saunders' strategic use of parenthetical phrases to further the character development.
ReplyDeleteThe one part of the story that hit me wrong was when he alludes to his checkered past. I thought that was too obvious - maybe a little telling rather than showing?
Oh, how wonderfully weird these stories were. In the first, the barber comes across as this sex obsessed old man without toes who lives with his overbearing mother. And yet, I kinda like him. The way his character is developed shows us his entire thought process. It's as though the story was written by the barber as a stream of consciousness piece. It was a very neat way to make a character so different as the barber rather relatable.
ReplyDeleteThen there's "I CAN SPEAK!" which was tremendous. The tone of the letter is lighthearted, like any correspondence you may have with a company, but the tone of the story is incredibly dark. Also it's funny too. I love it. The world that is presented in "I CAN SPEAK!" is clearly headed to an awful place. Children are never taught to talk, and the mask misrepresents their intentions to the point where parents aren't even thinking about what their children really want, but fully treat the masks voice as their child's. There's one scene in particular where the author of the letter says his son was scraping his face on the floor. I think the kid was definitely trying to get the mask off, but the adults only thought he was trying to say something about friction. It's another one of those stories that I enjoyed immensely, but would be hard pressed to accurately pinpoint the deeper meaning of.
I really enjoyed reading "The Barber's Unhappiness" because it characterized him so well that I actually felt a bit of sympathy towards him and his disposition. I felt as though Saunders described him not only through his own action, but by his mother's or better yet Ma's expectations of him. Throughout the story I couldn't help but feel a sort of resentment towards her most especially when she gave him grief about going out and meeting with the people in which he had met in Driving School. Overall, Mickey's character grew on me and his shallowness at the very beginning actually seemed to disappear at the end when he actually decided to meet with the slightly overweight young woman with a nice face. On the other hand, Saunders' short story "I CAN SPEAK" was completely different because there wasn't much dialogue involved in it. The author Rich Sminks did seem honest, but at the same time I felt as though he did care more about commission then he did with Mrs. Faniglia's satisfaction with the first product ICS1900. I like how something as unrealistic as a talking baby mask came to life in my mind, but at the same time I stayed grounded to the reality that it was something that I, personally, would never buy.
ReplyDeleteThis was alot different then most of the stories that we have read in this class. It probably comes down to the fact that when I read this character I actually want to sympathize with him on an emotional level. He seems so downtrodden that it is hard not too.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand I like how in the second story by Mr. Saunders my imagination was allowed to run wild and make decisions for me. I think that as an author it is very important to allow your reader to have that freedom and not totally take your word's as the 100% truth in the story.
So, I started reading "The Barber's Unhappiness" and I don't know about anyone else, but I was pretty confused. I don't know why I couldn't get through this story, but it was mad confusing to me. He changed his opinion of people so much it was difficult for me to keep up. I didn't know what was real and what was made up. The one thing that I did like was the way the story was more like a stream of consciousness. I thought that was brilliant. It was as if he never stopped thinking, and the way the story was written almost intermingled fantasy and reality together, which I thought helped bring the character to life.
ReplyDeleteI loved the way "I CAN SPEAK!" was written. I think that the use of a letter was perfect for the type of story it was, and I enjoyed this one a lot more than "The Barber's Unhappiness." I thought that the humor in it really brought me in, and I think it was cool how subtle Saunders mentioned the families and then developed them. The style was still the same as in the first story, but for some reason I appreciated this one more.