Critique #2: David Sedaris's "What I Learned"

In the essay "What I Learned," David Sedaris juxtaposes his metaphorically primitive and barbaric college experience first as an undergraduate student at Princeton and later as a graduate with his parents's ideals of the opportunities an Ivy League education would create. Readers follow Sedaris's reflections on his journey from acceptance to Princeton to the publication of his first book and his parents' opinions along the way. He uses imagery masterfully. Sedaris weaves the story of the metaphorical Princeton that burns failed students alive, that offers patricide and matricide majors and idol-worship classes, and whose graduates go on to become rat catchers with non-fictional accounts of his excessively proud father and his father's heavily bumper-stickered station wagon, living with his parents after graduating, the puppy that replaced him in his parents' home, and his parents' disappointment with his first book. Sedaris does not simply tell readers that he attended Princeton many years ago... and it was a lot different... because back then the grading was different... and they expected students to be humble... but his dad constantly boasted about him being a Princeton student... and when he became a literature major his parents thought it was a waste of an Ivy League education... and when he graduated he was one of several in his class who was not immediately employed... and his parents gave up hope on him... but then he wrote a book... that they didn't like. The story itself could be summed up in a horrible run on sentence like the one above (not a particularly interesting run-on sentence at that). But because he provided vivid imagery instead of delivering blatant facts or opinions, the essay is more engaging. For example, instead of just saying that the pass-fail system employed in his day fucked over a lot of people, he says that those who failed were burned alive "on a pyre that's now the Transgender Studies Building" (27). He provides an image that appeals to both the sense of smell and the sense of sight, when he says, "Following the first grading period, the air was so thick with smoke you could barely find your way across campus. There were those who said that it smelled like meat, no different from barbecue" (27). In saying that, he successfully conveys the thought that many students failed to make it to the second semester.