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A PICTURE OF THE CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY: THE STORY TELLER

A story within a story

Saki ( Hector Hugh Munro)

Mamta

Associate Prof. and Head

PG Dept of English

HMV, Jalandhar

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H.H. Munro

Saki is the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro, a witty and talented British writer best known for his short stories. He lived and wrote during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, frequently satirizing upper class British culture and society. Often known as H.H. Munro, he was a versatile writer; his works include plays, two novels, a historical study, and critical essays.
Saki's short stories are quite entertaining, even for the modern reader, partly because he liked to include a surprise at the end. His surprise endings were often considered shocking or inappropriate by Edwardian English standards, but were great fun for the reader.

Brief Plot Summary

''The Storyteller'' takes place on a railway carriage, a common type of transportation during the late 19th century when the story takes place.
In the story, the characters are traveling by railway.
Three children are traveling under the supervision of their aunt. The children are bored and restless, so the aunt tells a story about a little girl getting rescued because she was so good. This moralistic tone doesn't suit the children. Remember, at this time children were to be well-behaved and quiet, ''seen and not heard.'' So it's no surprise that their aunt is annoyed with their liveliness and curiosity.

Then, a bachelor riding in the same railway car offers to tell another story. In his version, the good little girl is eaten by a wolf in the prince's park. The medals she has won for ''goodness'' actually betray the little girl by clinking together and showing the wolf where she's hiding.
The little girl is eaten by a wolf in the story told by the bachelor.
All of the good girl's model behavior turns out to be the cause of her gruesome death.

Children are delighted with the alternative ending to the usual moral tale served up to them by adults. The aunt is disgusted, and the bachelor is amused that the aunt will probably be asked, in the future, to come up with improper stories when they're in public.

�Childhood in Edwardian England�

As mentioned earlier, this was a time when children were not expected to have any opinions. It was widely believed then that children had nothing to offer society until adulthood. What's more, children of the upper class spent most of their time away from the adults in the family, eating, playing, and sleeping in the confines of their home.

animation

In The Story-Teller by Saki we have the theme of morality, conflict, control, pride and humility. Taken from his The Complete Short Stories collection the story is a frame narrative and after reading the story the reader realises that Saki may be exploring the theme of morality. Unlike the Aunt’s story which has a happy if not unrealistic ending the bachelor’s story highlights the realities of life. Though Bertha was a good girl. She has paid for that goodness with her life. Which may be the point that Saki is attempting to make.
He could be suggesting that in real life things do not always go favorably for somebody just because they may have lived a good life. Which is very much the case for Bertha. It is also ironic that the reward she received for being good, the three medals, are in fact that cause of her being found by the wolf.

The author seems to be poking fun at the kind of dull, moralistic tales that were often told to children. In this story (as in real life) the children prefer the story of a goody-goody who is destroyed by her own goodness.
On another level, the author may be questioning the religious notion that good things happen to good people. Saki was hardly the first person to realize that righteous people often suffer the same (or worse) fate as evil ones.