The Storyteller

The short story under analysis entitled "The Storyteller" is written by Saki, who tells us about a bachelor who happens to share the compartment in the carriage with three children and their aunt. The children bother the woman with too many questions, so she decides to tell them a moralistic story about one good girl whose life has been saved because of her goodness. The children do not like the story much, and at this point the bachelor starts telling his own story about a good girl. He is very eloquent and he inculdes many succulent detailes in his story, and he can answer any question the children ask him. However, the end of the story, as logical it may be, is rather inappropriate for the aunt and the teaching purposes of her storytelling, because in the end the good girl is killed in spite of her goodness. Nonetheless, the children think that this story is the best they have ever heard.

The tone of the story is rather sarcastic. The first case of sarcasm can be found at the very beginning when the author tells us that an aunt in the carriage belongs to the children, basically relegating her to the it-level. He shows us that she is nothing, that she can invent nothing by herself and that the only thing she is capable of is repeating something that has been put in her head by the outwardly moralistic society. To show how powerless she is in front of these children, the author makes them to puzzle her with innumerable questions.

These repeating questions as well as a polysyndeton in the first sentence and a paragraph about a poem "On the Road to Mandalay" contribute to a deliriously monotonous atmosphere of the first part of the story. The hyperbole about the number of times the girl can repeat the line from the poem serves for the same reason.

When the bachelor finally stops being only an observer and joins the action, the atmosphere changes. It is no longer monotonous, there is no 'petulant question - lame answer' pattern. The children start actually being interested in the story told them by the bachelor, because he makes them interested. He uses an oxymoron that excites them - 'horribly good', because horribly good means unreal. It also predicts that something horrible is about to happen, and this turn of the plot is far from one in a usual story by their aunt and, probably, their other female relatives.

To make the story fascinating, the bachelor also applies irony, when he speaks about flowers in the park, which Bertha was not allowed to gather and which unfortunately never existed. But the best case of irony and the darkest one is connected with Bertha's fate. She thinks that if she were not that good, she would have never been allowed in such a beautiful park, but just a second later she regrets being allowed here, she regrets being a good girl, because it is her goodness that causes her huge trouble.

The reaction of the children may prompt to us the message of the story. The author discovers the true face of people, who are cruel creatures who like listening to the stories of people suffering more than to the boring stories of people achieving success and living happily after. The children were not terrified by the horrible end of the girl, they found the ending "beautiful" and even casually asked if any pig were killed as if a girl is less than a pig. In fact, in this case we return to the beginning, where the aunt is introduced to us more as a thing than a person. It makes us suspect that the untrue-to-life stories about good girls and boys are as useless as the people telling them.

This is the second message. The author is mocking at all the moralistic stories being told to children at his time (and now, to be honest). These stories are almost always far from the real life. On the one hand, they teach that one should be a good child, and it will benefit him or her. On the other hand, they do not teach that being good does not guarantee being alive. They do not teach the cruel reality. Besides, they are boring. Being boring and wrong at the same time makes these stories useless.