Victory Lap George Saunders Summary

Rhetorical Analysis Essay
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Rhetorical Analysis Essay
George Saunders is a renowned science fiction writer. Saunders’ Pastoralia includes dark humor and humanistic narratives regarding peculiar minutia. His other collection, In Persuasion Nation, contains the story Christmas, which is basically an autobiographical narrative. Sea Oak is one of the stories in the Pastoralia collection, and it narrates the story of Aunt Bernie who comes back from the dead after she was scared to death. This essay demonstrates an understanding and awareness of a text’s relationship to the conventions of its genre. In particular, this paper shows why George Saunders uses the stylistic qualities that he does in his fiction, the purpose he is trying to accomplish and the message he is trying to put across. The paper points out whether the message and purpose could be achieved in any other way, and what makes Saunders’ rhetorical choices effective or fitting. What can be inferred about the audience and the context in Saunders’ writing are also discussed in this paper.
George Saunders employs the stylistic qualities that he does in his fiction to convey various messages and to serve different purposes. In Sea Oak for instance, Saunders employs postmodern intervention technique in order to convey a message/purpose about modern working-class life covering the themes of religion, capitalism, and poverty. In Saunders’ fiction stories, the characters are largely losers of American history for instance the oppressed and the dispossessed. In essence, the subject of George Saunders is most of all the American working class. In essence, Sea Oak narrates an account of one or two strange weeks in the life of a working-class family. The story’s climactic even takes place when an intruder breaks into the apartment of the family scares aunt Bernie to death, literally. One of the cops who were called to check on her stated that “I suspect she died of fright...fright of the intruder” (100). This narrative represents a working-class family and reflexively and greatly aware of its incapability to express the family’s as well as its own strange hauntedness. The limit of the story’s mainly realistic representational strategy call for a major intervention, strongly manifested when the ironic, realist, and grotesque-comic discourse of the narrative is interrupted by Aunt Bernie’s resurrection from the dead. The narrator states “At home the door’s wide open. Jade and Min are sitting staring at the rocking chair, and in the rocking chair is Bernie. Bernie’s body. Same glasses, same perm, same blue dress we buried her in. What’s it doing here?” (112). Then “she turns her head and looks at me and says, sit the fuck down” (112). Apparently she has come back from the dead.
In essence, the resurrection of Aunt Bernie actually constitutes a postmodernist intervention in the prevailing discourse of the narrative since it foregrounds important questions of ontology: could Aunt Bernie’s resurrection be real? Did she actually come back from the dead? What type of world can this really happen? George Saunders, in Sea Oak, show...