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Summary Of Jesus Shaves By David Sedaris

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“Jesus Shaves” is a short story by the American writer David Sedaris. The story is set in a French class in France. It starts with the teacher explaining a new pronoun one. She was asking students what one does during different festivals and holidays such as Bastille Day or Easter. There are many different ethnic groups represented in the class, such as Italian, Polish, and Moroccan. Few people were contributing to the discussion because on that certain day it was on a voluntary basis. One of them was a Moroccan woman who spoke French, but enrolled in the class to improve her grammar. The narrator paints her as annoying, know-it-all type who was taking it too seriously. “By the end of her first day, she’d raised her hand so many times, her shoulder had given out” – this is how the narrator describes her ceaseless activity (463). …show more content…

The teacher let the other students explain it to her. A lot of different, grammatically incorrect answers were given, such as “He weared long hair, and after he died, the first day he come back here for to say hello to the peoples” (464). Then the Italian nanny said that one might eat chocolate on Christmas. The teacher asked who brought the chocolate and the narrator answered that it was Easter Bunny who did it. The teacher argued that it was a big bell from Rome that brought the chocolate. The Moroccan woman was confused. The narrator wondered whether without a language barrier, he and his classmates could have done a better job of explaining Christianity, an idea that sounded unlikely to begin with. Sedaris ends the story by discussing a concept of faith and how it plays a role both in religion as well as in everyday human endeavors such as learning a new

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