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Introduction

Unarguably, George Saunders stands in the vanguard of contemporary American fiction authors. His writing has appeared in magazines ranging from The New Yorker to GQ. He has received the National Magazine Award for fiction more than any writer except Alice Munro (both have been honored four years). Likewise, he has been the recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award and a MacArthur “genius grant.” In 2017, he won The Man Booker Prize for his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, and a year later was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This is only a sampling of the accolades he has received. For his short yet impressive career, which spans about twenty-five years, Saunders, who currently teaches creative writing at Syracuse University, has been honored more than most authors can ever hope to be in a lifetime. Despite the plaudits, his aim is no different than that of any writer: to keep the reader interested. With four short fiction collections, a chapbook, a children’s book, a story-cycle, a separate novella, an e-book, a children’s book, an essay collection, a commencement speech, and now a novel—and a few stray or as yet uncollected writings—he has kept his readers wanting more, meanwhile establishing himself as one of the premier American fiction authors alive today.

He is also extremely humble and generous. I met Saunders once at a reading in Dallas, Texas, the state where he was born. While signing copies of Tenth of December for my wife and me, he asked if we were also writers. We replied in the affirmative, and while I am not certain what expression my wife was wearing, I could not help but think that I must have looked like a star-struck schoolboy. Of all the book signings I have attended, there are few in which I walked away feeling confident about the impression I made. Whether he remembers the encounter or not, I felt content walking away from Saunders because he made me feel like he cared. He said that he was sure we would meet again; the writing world is small. I felt like I mattered, not just as a writer but as a person. I imagine he makes a lot of people feel this way.

Since then, I have exchanged emails with him. Not only was I not ignored but he responded thoroughly. One of the characteristics of his writing that has particularly caught my attention is the integrity and candor of his choices—in terms of language, diction, detail, and subject. The simplicity of his writing style, both in his fiction and nonfiction, comes across as sincere especially because, upon reflection and analysis, the stories present complex scenarios. While some first-time readers may find his stories strange, this is not because what he presents us is far-fetched or unrelatable but because of his stylistic choices, which also make him a fresh and distinctive voice in literature. However, Saunders would be the first to insist that his approach to stories is practical. Here is part of Saunders’s response to a query about ethics in his literature:

I do, yes, think of stories as ethical objects—but I should first say that my way of thinking about stories is very...functional. I feel that my first goal is to make them compelling in some way for the reader—otherwise, nothing happens ethically or aesthetically or politically, because the reader doesn't go on, or does so tepidly. So a story, in my view, should be “ethical” in that I want some sense of outrage or sympathy to rise up in the reader so that she will continue to be interested. (HQ, ellipsis and italics original)

It may seem that Saunders, by his own words, aims primarily to entertain. However, if this is so then why the laurels? What makes his writing different? In this epoch of immersive digital entertainment, why bother to read the fiction of an author like Saunders? Each of his stories is a world in itself, one that exists just far enough from our own that we want to explore its terrain and just close enough to our own to leave us feeling something about life in our immediate world.

Reviews of his stories often focus on the blend of high and low art, the use of jargon and idiomatic speech, and his portrayals of working class America. Occasionally, his style is described as magical realism, but many of his stories could be considered speculative fiction. However, he is not exclusive to any one genre. What is common to his fiction is, as Adam Begley notes in his review of Pastoralia for The Guardian, “an unsettling amalgam of degraded language and high art: slogans, jargon and the crippling incoherence of daily speech, arranged on the page with meticulous care,” including the “brutal solecisms of the American vernacular,” which are played both for laughs and the “odd shot of beauty, too” (2000, n.p.). In his earlier fiction, the characters are usually working class American citizens. However, in the fiction he began publishing in the twenty-first century, the characters became more varied, including an increasing number of children, nonhuman animals, and even abstract shapes or objects. Saunders’s stories also tend to involve what Kasia Boddy, in The American Short Story since 1950, describes as exaggerations “to the point of dystopia some familiar aspect of our late capitalist world before introducing a character who voices, either sincerely or in horror, an alternative vision of enlightened (or at least ‘light-craving’) individuality" (2010, 143-144). Many of his characters are striving to do the “right” thing without always knowing for certain what that is.

Drawing on the work of critics such as Layne Neeper, Julian Nalerio, David P. Rando, Todd Cesaratto, Sarah Pogell, Catherine Garnett, Christine Bieber Lake, and of those found in the first collection of criticism, George Saunders: Critical Essays (2017), edited by Philip Coleman and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff, a book newly published after I began work on this monograph, the following chapters acknowledge what these critics have discovered in the fiction of Saunders while exploring more rigorously some features of fiction that have not yet received much attention. Most of the essays have focused on issues of class, work, postmodernism, or language and style, especially as these topics pertain to contemporary American culture. A couple of essays take on ghosts or zombies, which appear in a few Saunders stories and especially in his novel. Surprisingly, few essays are devoted to satire or ethics, despite constant references by critics to Saunders’s satirical voice and ethical or moral edge. Finally, only one essay, by David Huebert, begins to explore notions of animality, despite the preponderance of nonhuman animals in Saunders’s fiction. None examines the fiction from the particular posthumanist angle that I take up, which is interested in the relations between human and nonhuman animals, nor how Saunders’s notions of ethics relate to those of philosopher Jacques Derrida and many posthumanist theorists.

My intent here is to demonstrate how Saunders’s writing, in particular his short fiction, can help us in several ways. First, it can assist us in identifying the posthuman world in which we reside and in maintaining awareness of the ethical challenges we may encounter. Next, it can provide us with a greater understanding of how this world and its ethical challenges function in posthumanist ways. Furthermore, it may allow us to theorize from a different standpoint. His writing might seem simple and, therefore, more accessible, but it is in no way vapid and is at once as comprehensible and relatable as it is disorienting. Thus, Saunders’s fiction, through an idiosyncratic language (characterized by an unorthodox use of capitals and a truncated syntax, among further rhetorical devices) and the presentation of complex ethical situations, allows us to examine concepts in the form of scenarios that may remain occluded to “straightforward” philosophical theorization. Such concepts give to his fiction, which often converges with “dark” satire, an ethical register that is synonymous with posthumanist ethics, making him an important commentator on contemporary American culture, while also marking his writing as an important resource in posthumanist discourse.

Saunders’s published fiction is comprised of four collections of short stories, a children’s book, a novella, a Kindle single, and a novel, along with two uncollected stories from the story-cycle Four Institutional Monologues (2000),¹ “A Two-Minute Note to the Future” (2014)—published on fast-food chain Chipotle Mexican Grill bags²—and the The New Yorker story, “Mothers’ Day” (2016). Additionally, one early story, “A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room” (1986) remains extant. Along with the fiction, he has also published a collection of essays, The Braindead Megaphone (2007), and an earlier chapbook, A bee stung me, so I killed all the fish (notes from the Homeland 2003–2006), from which some of the essays published in The Braindead Megaphone first appeared. A number of these essays—for example, “Ask the Optimist!” and “Woof!: A Plea of Sorts”—read more like fiction. A few of his essays, such as The New Yorker exclusive, “Who Are All These Trump Supporters?” (2016), remain uncollected. Additionally, a commencement speech, delivered at Syracuse University, is published as Congratulations by the way: Some Thoughts on Kindness (2014). For my purposes here, I focus on the analysis of Saunders’s fiction, using his nonfiction to inform my commentaries where necessary, as I progress through the fiction chronologically.

Before addressing his fiction, I devote Chapter 1 to Saunders’s position in contemporary American literature as a satirical and ethical author, then proceed to Chapter 2, which focuses on notions of posthumanism, as formulated by various theorists, and how these concepts relate to nonhuman animals, the development of posthumanist ethics, and Saunders’s fiction. I then move on to cover the fiction, analyzing one text per chapter—except chapter 5, which examines two—in order to demonstrate how the fiction relates to posthumanist ethics, as well as human and nonhuman animal relationships. Thus, Chapter 3 is an analysis of the short story “The 400-Pound CEO” from the first collection, Civilwarland in Bad Decline (1996). The story, narrated in first-person, concerns an obese man who works for a sadistic employer at a raccoon retrieval operation that kills the raccoons it supposedly rescues and frees. My analysis focuses on how Saunders’s satire of American culture also functions critically, as well as on how his fiction, by being “experiential,” helps the presentation of ethics. Furthermore, I examine how humans determine who is ethically “worthy” and how the story complicates questions of what is ethically “right.”

I follow in Chapter 4 with an analysis of the titular novella from the second collection, Pastoralia (2000), which concerns the lives of two characters, the passive narrator and his rebellious colleague, both of whom work and live on display in a theme park, confined to a simulacrum of a cave, where they are supposed to behave like stereotypical cavepeople. I begin with an inquiry into what language is—that is, as a system of communication that is frequently touted as being exclusive to humans. I then explore how philosopher Jacques Derrida’s notion of “carnophallogocentrism” pertains to the novella. Finally, I take up the problem of utilitarian ethics espoused by the company in the novella.

Chapter 5 is concerned with Saunders’s children’s story, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip (2000), and a novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (2005). Both read somewhat allegorically, despite the differences in their target audiences. The former is about a girl who, tired of removing creatures called “gappers” from goats so that the goats will give milk, decides to learn to fish. Her neighbors, who at first refuse to help her, eventually seek her help. My analysis examines the book presents some of the more traditionally humanist tendencies Saunders usually evades in his writing and how, in the story, human livelihood is dependent on the enslavement or killing of nonhuman beings. I follow this brief analysis with another one focusing on a novella about abstract beings called “Hornerites.” When the Inner Hornerites accidentally “invade” Outer Horner, Phil, a rancorous Outer Hornerite who calls the Inner Hornerites a threat, gains support, takes over the presidency, and attempts a genocide of the Inner Hornerites. For my analysis of the novella, I investigate both the published text and the outtakes included on the website, <www.reignofphil.com>, addressing conceptions of who is considered human and how the language and practice of genocide are related to our conceptions of nonhuman animals as inferior.

I return to the short story collections in Chapter 6, which focuses on the story “93990” from In Persuasion Nation (1996). Written as a toxicology report, it is narrated presumably by a scientist who is conducting tests of a drug, the purpose of which remains unstated, on a group of monkeys, each of whom dies or is sacrificed after demonstrating a series of hideous behaviors caused by the effects of the drug—except for monkey 93990, who is immune. I use the opportunity in this chapter to explore the routine sacrifice of nonhuman animals for the sake of human well-being and the role of the biomedical industry, known as Big Pharma, in the United States, as well as the Judeo-Christian influence on notions of life and death. I also dissect how the story’s use of passive voice is indicative of that found in biomedical reports, generating the false sense of an impartial observer.

In Chapter 7, I analyze the story “Puppy” from the most recent short story collection, Tenth of December (2013), which features Saunders’s “ventriloquist” technique, a third-person narrative style that can render thoughts in the first person. The story alternates between the intertwining plotlines of two female characters and their familial concerns. As one woman plans to take home a puppy for her children, the woman offering the free puppy takes pride in how she has devised to keep one of her children safe—he seems to have a cognitive difference and is prone to running across the highway—by tying him to a tree in the backyard. Conflict ensues when the mother who has come to collect the puppy discovers the child tied to the tree. I begin my analysis by examining Saunders’s literary techniques, which include the use of the aforementioned “ventriloquist” narrator, the “communicating vessels” form that shapes the story, and the use of motif. I then explore how Saunders complicates ethics and notions of animality, followed by a Derridean take on the use of naming, sacrifice, shame, and the “abyssal limit” of the human.

I then devote Chapter 8 to Fox 8: A Story (2013), published the same year as Tenth of December but separately as a Kindle single. The epistolary story, which takes the form of a single letter, features Saunders’s first nonhuman animal narrator, the fox of the title, who learns to speak and write what he calls “Yuman” language. When a mall is developed near the home of his fellow foxes, he and his friend set out to befriend the Yumans. After his friend is killed by Yumans, he discovers that his home and his fellow foxes are also gone, leading him to seek out a new family of foxes and to write a letter to Yumans. My analysis starts by covering the story’s use of anthropomorphism, Jason Wyckoff’s conception of “dominionism,” and the privileging of human verbal language. I then move on to explore Fox 8’s own brand of ethics.

Finally, in Chapter 9, I conclude with a reading of the novel Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), which uses a collage technique that allows Saunders to employ a variety of narrative voices to relate President Abraham Lincoln’s late night visit to the crypt where the body of his recently deceased son, Willie, is interred and the effect Abraham’s presence has on the ghostly inhabitants of the “bardo,” a Tibetan Buddhist term for a liminal space between lives but, in the novel, a graveyard. Saunders intersperses chapters that include both real and fictional historical sources throughout the main storyline, which is recounted primarily by three of the “postdead” beings whose goal it is to free Willie from being consigned to the bardo for eternity. I explore the reception of this novel at this point in Saunders’s career and how it relates to and furthers the characteristic features and style found in his short fiction. I end by addressing how Saunders employs nonhuman animals, “posthuman” ghostly entities, and formerly enslaved peoples in a text preoccupied with life, death, and liminality. This final chapter will demonstrate how Saunders’s fiction addresses posthuman issues beyond my focus on nonhuman animals.

I also include an exclusive interview with George Saunders in the appendix. His responses to my questions both complement and, on occasion, contradict my readings of his fiction, which I believe provides a more well-rounded understanding of his writings. Above all, it is important to note how he concludes that authorial intention is indefinable. The way I understand this to mean is that what happens during the writing process may not be consciously intended yet may be felt. As Saunders notes in the interview, feeling is another sort of intelligence, which is important to recognize, especially as it pertains both to writer and reader. I believe that what he chooses to write about—or, more precisely, what strikes him as possible and interesting enough to write about—is intentional in a felt sense rather than a logically considered one. It just so happens that what strikes him as possible and intriguing to write about is what critics pick up on in his writing.

As Jeff Turrentine boasts in his review of Tenth of December for The Washington Post, Saunders’s writing helps us to understand “the connections among sexism, racism, post-colonialism, late-stage capitalism and white middle-class anxiety” (2013, n.p.). I add that Saunders also helps us to understand the connections among further issues, whether they be sociocultural, sociopolitical, ecological, or axiological. In this sense, his writing is interdisciplinary. However, before addressing any of the multiple points I have mentioned, which will unfold in the following chapters, a contextualization of Saunders’s writing is due.