After reading Murdoch and Kern, I can say that David Antin’s essay, “The Theory and Practice of Postmodernism: A Manifesto.” reflects Murdoch’s ideals of “good talk”. Antin’s essay achieves this through his structure; it does not include any commas, capitalization or periods. It all seems to flow like words through someone’s head. In reality no one actually pictures capitalizing names or places. We do not form any grammatical changes as we hear words. Antin’s essay resembles words going through his mind as he is preparing to shop for a new mattress like anyone else would.

The way Antin’s writing pushes the envelope further to experiment with the boundaries between spoken and written language is it seems to be obsessed with showing how form and content are interconnected. His essay contains almost no punctuation, besides a few question marks and quotes. The choice he made to do that gives the reader a chance to decide what might it mean. It could be the thoughts of a man shopping for a mattress or perhaps more. His essay almost seems like it is about itself, not just the couple purchasing a mattress.
When you reach the end of the essay and learn that after he and his wife Ellie picked a new mattress and she still suffers from back pain, you can only think that maybe her back pain was not the only reason they went shopping for a mattress or even why this essay was based on the shopping experience. I think Antin wrote his essay on purpose to show future essayists that writing a story does not have to be about a huge event it can be as simple as describing a memory of shopping for a new mattress and we do not have any grammar rules to follow in our essays.
This can be shown in the last paragraph when he quoted Descartes, “if youre lost in the forest and you have no idea which way to go go for it straight ahead because it is not likely to be any worse than anything else” (122) it shouldn’t matter what you are writing about, you should just make sure what you are saying matters to you. Essays do not have “correct” forms or structures. From Antin’s perspective, essays we decide to write should be told as Kern and Murdoch explained; light and personal conversations. An essay should reflect the writer’s personality through a conversation. Do not worry about your topic being boring or too simple, as Antin has guided us through his essay, he has proven that any story will do. With this in mind it is easy to say that Antin’s essay reflects Kern’s lessons of also “writing for the ear”. He does not pay much attention to how interesting or grammatically correct his essay is, but instead prints his words down as a conversation going on with himself internally for the reader to hear and imagine. The way his words are printed help us readers understand him as an individual and what he is doing as a writer. He is guiding future essayists to understand there is more than one way to write a great/good essay.