George Saunders as a Poet

George Saunders is a kind of poet of the post-modernist short-story. He employs the hyper-realism of Don Delillo and his cohorts, the multiple viewpoints of David Foster Wallace and the other post-modern maximalists, and the pastiche technique of Margaret Atwood. These various devices and styles come together seamlessly, filtered through Saunders’ unique sensibility to create stories that question the nature of being and the human condition. The primary subject of his stories is the powerful emotions experienced by his characters, and his language serves to create that emphasis. Saunders frequently disregards grammatical rules and forms his sentences using characters’ thought patterns. This practice, sometimes referred to as fragmentation, is most often a technique of poetry. The story “Victory Lap” demonstrates this tactic particularly in those sections told from Allison’s point of view, her mind jumping from the ballet steps she is practicing to her idealized thoughts about admiring boys to her school classes to the pleasures of her suburban neighborhood. Saunders’ writing can feel like poetry also when it becomes so impressionistic and disconnected from any clear meaning as to be nearly abstract. This happens, for example, in the section at the end of “Escape from Spiderhead” when Jeff is dying and sees life more clearly than he had when he was alive. The effectiveness of Saunders’ stories suggests that the distinction between prose and poetry is not completely clear and that it may not be especially important.