David Sedaris in His Short

¶ … David Sedaris

In his short story Me Talk Pretty One Day, author David Sedaris uses several different literary tools to construct a story that is both humorous and easily identifiable with common experiences and responses that all of us have experienced at one time or another, in different contexts.

Starting with his opening paragraph, Sedaris introduces the topic of his story with the sophisticated image suggested by the term "true debutante" which he contrasts, for humorous effect shortly thereafter with the his description of a perk associated with his "debutante" training program, in the form of billboards "... picturing a cartoon stegosaurus sitting in a canoe and eating what appears to be a ham sandwich."

Continuing later in his opening page, Sedaris begins his character and theme development simply by choosing the names Kang and Vlatnya for two of his fellow students and by introducing the notion of utter incomprehensibility of the French spoken by the instructor, using the (non)words meimslsxp, lgpdmurci, and apzkiubjxow in her opening remarks, a mechanism for humor to which Sedaris returns several times again with similar effect.

Sedaris then introduces the running theme of the dual futility of satisfying a teacher who is probably incapable of being satisfied, and the identifiable frustration of trying to express one's complex thoughts using only the rudiments of elementary foreign language skills. Sedaris repeats the same formula of creating humor through the inclusion of the unexpected several times, in ending Anna's statement with her hatred of mosquitoes, Carlos' love of wine, music, and "making sex with the womans of the world, and the author's own recollections about his mother's love of rare steaks, cats, and Tums.

Sedaris uses the teacher's responses to magnify the sense of futility of trying to satisfy her using only elementary language skills by describing the students' efforts to avoid her wrath after witnessing her responses to previous student-victims, which, from her escalating political attacks (in a language class) against her hapless Eastern European enemies. At that point, Sedaris takes the opportunity to point out the utterly arbitrary nature of linguistic gender assignment in the first place, while also reinforcing the impossibility of avoiding continued mistakes in his own failure to pronounce "IBM" properly.

In his comparative description of the teacher as an unpredictable "wild animal," the author reminds us all of the fears we once had of former teachers and other authority figures from childhood whose harsh criticisms in reaction to our mistakes were incapable of anticipation in advance for the purposes of avoidance. Sedaris then uses exaggeration to reinforce the threat of failure by describing the need to "... dodge chalk and protect our heads and stomachs whenever she approached us with a question."

The literal image is, of course, exaggerated for humor, but the fear of inevitable failure in the eyes of an authority figure who probably prefers our failures to our successes because of the opportunity they represent to chastise us is identifiable to most readers. Likewise, despite the exaggerated imagery, Sedaris also reminds us of the connection between anxiety from the fear of failure (particularly in front of an audience) and abdominal discomfort.

Sedaris continues in that direction, culminating in his description of the teacher's accidentally stabbing the shy Korean student in the eye with a "freshly sharpened pencil," also adding the humor in the sarcasm of the author's observation "in fairness" that the pencil attack was at least unintentional.

One of the author's best uses of humorous description and comedic exaggeration to remind the reader of identifiable fears and frustrations comes in the paragraph where the author describes his growing self-perception of being completely unable to express himself in a foreign language and the fear of public embarrassment with which most readers can also identify, having experienced the latter in one way or another:

My fear and discomfort crept beyond the borders of the classroom and accompanied me out onto the wide boulevards. Stopping for coffee, asking directions, depositing money in my bank account: these things were out of the question, as they involved having to speak.... When the phone rang, I ignored it. If someone asked me a question, I pretended to be deaf."