Kerschen is a writer and public school district administrator. In this essay, Kerschen examines Saroyan's use of an autobiographical and free form style to express the continuum of life.

To understand "Resurrection of a Life" one has to be able to discern the message of the story as it is woven into Saroyan's unique narrative style. In addition, as is typical of Saroyan's writing, it is autobiography and commentary thinly disguised as fiction. As part of his collection of short stories entitled Inhale & Exhale, this story repeatedly used that phrase. These elements combine in the first paragraph that opens with "Everything begins with inhale and exhale" and ends with "myself, a small boy, crossing a street, alive somehow, going somewhere."

The boy in "Resurrection of a Life" is a newsboy just as Saroyan was during his childhood in Fresno, California. H. W. Matalene reports in his biographical...