Saunders; Criticizing Life through Literature

Sometimes it is tough to look at the negatives of life that we face every day without fear of being too pessimistic, negative, or labeled as depressed. People like to think having a positive outlook on life is key to making this world a safer place, but being aware of life’s downfalls is the actual passage to improving society. Understanding this concept can be seen with stunning clarity when reading short stories from the author George Saunders, such as “Puppy”, “Civil WarLand in Bad Decline”, “The Semplica Girl Diaries”, and “The Red Bow”. Saunders does an excellent job of transforming our society’s true injustices into alternate settings, allowing the reader to see these problems for what they truly are and develop a more profound thought on what the world can sometimes be today; a negative and scary place.

Saunders shows these negative traits of society through many different forms and almost always changes the setting in order to take the reader out of their usual comfort zone of everyday life and place them in a new world. In the story “Puppy”, Saunders uses opposing viewpoints, including the two different families, to illustrate the different ways people show their love. This is all done while also highlighting the challenges of growing up with abusive parents, and how to not repeat that cycle of abuse and neglect to their own children. “Life will not always be like this” is a repeated phrase that hits home for so many kids across the world. Children coming from a broken home most likely repeat this quote like one would repeat a daily prayer. This story dives deep into the lives that many people around us may be facing, but we never see what is really behind closed doors in society.

In other stories, Saunders showcases a dystopian world that appears awful and heavily fictional to some readers but is a grim prediction of what will happen to our society if we follow the ugly trends and ways we currently are embarking on. Some of these futures take place in the form of a totalitarian government regime, like when Uncle Matt and Jason go around town not only killing all the animals but convincing the neighborhood that these animals deserve to die. If this does not alarm the reader, they are blind to the fact that governments worldwide already commit these atrocities daily. There is a scary similarity between what is going on in The Red Bow and the Holocaust. When Uncle Matt convinces the town to, “…kill every dog, and every cat, kill every mouse, every bird. Kill every fish. Any-one objects, kill them too”, he is acting similarly to how Hitler convinced the German population in the mid-20th century to get behind the murder of all those who do not represent the master race. This type of analysis works really well to highlight the downfalls of society in a disguised entertainment fashion.

In “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline”, Saunders highlights the many problems that arise from a money-driven society and the ultimate downfall it causes. Greed and narcissism are the main traits shown through the character Mr. A, but these are common amongst the wealthy in our population. Struggling to stand up for themselves and eventually being looped into the problem happens all too often within our capitalistic society. This is an excellent story of good versus bad, and the civil war setting, pitting the Union against the Confederates, is a perfect way to tell it. In another use of the opposite style of characters, Mr. A, and Sam drive the theme home by allowing the reader to clearly see the difference between these two characters. Saunders has done an excellent job of setting characters on opposite sides of the spectrum to exploit flaws and shortcomings.

In “The Semplica-Girl Diaries”, which is the most different style of all the stories, the story is told through individual diary entries as opposed to the basic style of a short story. Saunders talks about the struggle many humans face in comparing themselves to other people who have more while also tackling the topics of human exploitation and trafficking. This story is all done in a newer writing style, which may be hard for some to understand. The story is set through diary entries and almost represents a stream of consciousness with random sentence breaks and thoughts that seemingly come out of nowhere. For a fan of something different from the standard literature, this would be an excellent read.

Saunders does such an excellent job of portraying these real-world issues into something enjoyable while also not making the story seem too real. These are just fictional enough to intrigue the reader and merely represent our current society to show the theme and message. His use of grim settings, characters with significant flaws, and the relevance of the themes to today’s society make these a must-read for anyone who enjoys real-life situations and not the fairytales some authors portray. George Saunders’s use of polarizing characters helps drive home his themes perfectly Whether these stories are about an amusement park, puppies, or a birthday, these stories represent the deeper messages Saunders is trying to convey so well. Saunders takes on the most prominent flaws the human race has, from greed and money to corrupt government and even abuse in families.. Saunders is a must-read for the reader who enjoys deeper level thinking and the act of taking a step back to evaluate our society.