Analysis of 'Pastoralia' by George Saunders

As you may or may not know, I am a pretty big fan of George Saunders' work. 'Pastoralia' is the first story in Saunders' collection of stories titled 'Pastoralia' that was first published in 2000. This collection is interesting in that it only contains 6 stories each of which originally appeared in the New Yorker. This collection also contains my favorite of Saunders' stories, 'Sea Oak,' which I have written about here if you are interested.

Pastoralia inspired the Geico caveman television ad.

Here is the fun part where I explain the strange world of 'Pastoralia." I greatly enjoyed entering the bizarre world inhabited by the story's characters and seeing how those characters interacted with each other. 'Pastoralia' is the story of a man whose job is to impersonate a caveman at an amusement park. The man's goal is to impersonate a caveman as authentically as possible while also providing a pleasant experience for guests. This man narrates the story in first person with a very dry sense of humor. He describes the daily tasks of his job such as roasting goats or squatting and pretending to eat bugs like a bureaucrat working in an office.

The second most prominent character in the story is Janet, whose job is to play the caveman wife of the narrator. Janet does not do a good job of playing a caveman. She speaks english in the cave when she is not supposed to and she has much less passion for her job than the narrator does. Fortunately for Janet, the narrator does not want to rat out Janet's poor performance in the performance reviews that he fills out each night and faxes to his supervisor. But Janet's performance becomes so bad that the narrator has no choice but to disclose Janet's failures as a cavewoman. This is the main conflict of the story: the narrator's internal struggle of whether to accurately fill out a performance review that would cause Janet to be fired.

I loved this story. Saunders is one of the best at portraying the monotony of having a boring job. The way that certain phrases and actions are repeated throughout the story is one of my favorite things about it. For example the narrator says each day whether or not someone has poked their head in, meaning a visitor has come to his cave. In the past the narrator says that people would "poke their heads in" all the time but now this happens much less frequently. The repetition of phrases such as this makes it easier to feel the narrator's strange experience. While I could see how someone might interpret the repetition of phrases as bothersome, I am thankful that Saunders used this technique and I believe that it makes the story better.

At the end of 'Pastoralia' Janet is fired and replaced by another woman named Linda who possesses a permanently installed uni-brow. The narrator is encouraged by his supervisor to obtain a permanent uni-brow for himself. The narrator is also surprised by his new coworker's commitment to playing a cave-woman. She squats and pretends to eat bugs all afternoon and even eats a bug. There's a sense that life will continue as normal for the narrator with the exception of one thing: he will now have to be even more committed to caveman authenticity because of the pressure to match his co-worker's dedication.

It has been a few months since I have felt the urge to write about a story I have read. Reading Saunders' 'Pastoralia' rekindled my need to process the sheer absurdity of what I read through the act of writing down my thoughts. This is a story I know I will come back to again and again. I recommend it to anyone who is in need of a good laugh or who wants to enter the world of a caveman impersonator.

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