Analyzing Saki's "The Open
Window"
Taken form
“The Open Window” by Hector Hugh Munro, who is better known by the
pseudonym Saki, is an
ironic short story. Letters of introduction, formal
visits, and polite conversation with total strangers are revealed as empty and
trite in “The Open Window.” It is a thematic mockery on the principles of
social etiquette. In this essay, I will analyze the story. I am going to break
the story down into parts to show what parts of the story are portrayed through
which elements.
The first element is the exposition. The purpose of the exposition- to
set the tone and mood, introduce the characters and setting, and provide
necessary background information- is achieved. In the exposition, the narrator
provides the reader with necessary background information to help create the
setting and the mood by informing the reader about Mr. Nuttel’s sister (Mr.
Nuttel will be more thoroughly introduced in the next paragraph) and her
letters of introduction. Mr. Nuttel is introduced as a nervous guy versus Vera
(who will also be introduced more thoroughly in the next paragraph) who is a
very self-possessed young woman. Overall, the exposition is reached when the
nervous Mr. Nuttel and self-possessed Vera meet.
In “The Open Window,” the character of Framton Nuttel is created and
introduced through direct description and portrayal of behavior, two techniques
of characterization. Placed opposite the ineffective and earnest Mr. Nuttel is
Vera. “My aunt will be down presently, Mr. Nuttel,” said Vera, a very poised
fifteen year old, creating the setting. Mr. Nuttel tried to say the “correct
something” to compliment Vera while awaiting Mrs. Sappleton, which sets the
mood as nervous and uncomfortable. Vera is Mrs. Sappleton’s niece, who has a
rather eccentric approach to formal visits and polite conversation with
strangers, while Mr. Nuttel is more of a nervous guy.
The second element is the inciting incident, which is the event that
introduces the central conflict. The inciting incident occurs when Vera
mentions her aunt’s “great tragedy” and the open window. It all began when Mr.
Nuttel met Vera, and she began to tell him the story of her aunt’s tragedy of
her husband, two brothers, and dog. For Mr. Nuttel, tragedies seemed out of
place because it was restful country spot. Vera asked Mr. Nuttel if he knew
people there, and in turn, he told her about his sister and her letters of
introduction.
Mr. Nuttel was supposed to be undergoing nerve treatment. His sister
told him when he was preparing to migrate that he would bury himself there not
speaking to a living soul, and his nerves would be worse than ever from moping.
So she decided she would just give him letters of introduction to all the
people she knew there. That is how he met Vera. He didn’t think that the formal
visits to complete strangers would do any good towards helping his nerve cure.
Then, Vera questioned if Mr. Nuttel knew her aunt, and he replied only her name
and address.
In the next element, the rising action develops the conflict to a high
point of intensity. In this story the rising action is reached when Vera
dramatically relates a story about how her aunt’s husband, two brothers, and
dog left through the window to go hunting and never returned. “Her great
tragedy happened just three years ago; that would be since your sister’s time,”
said Vera. “You may wonder why we keep that window wide open on an October
afternoon,” said the niece indicating a large French window. Then, she continued
on with her story.
Three years ago, her husband and two brothers went off with the dog for
their days shooting through that window, but never came back. In crossing the
moor to their favorite bird hunting ground they were all engulfed in a perilous
piece of marsh, and their bodies were never recovered. As Vera told her story,
she lost her self-possessed voice and became a faltering human. She claims her
aunt always thinks that they’ll come back some day with the little brown
spaniel that was lost with them and walk in that window just as they used to,
and that is why the window is kept open every evening until dusk. She often
says how they went out, her husband with his white waterproof coat over his arm
and Ronnie, her youngest brother, singing, ‘Bertie, why do you bond?’ as he
always did to tease her because it got on her nerves. Vera says on still quiet
evenings she gets a creepy feeling that they will walk in that window.
The fourth element is the climax, the true high point of interest in the
story. Mr. Nuttel was relieved when Mrs. Sappleton came into the room with
apologies for being late in making her appearance. “I hope you don’t mind the
open window; my husband and brothers will be home directly from shooting, and
they always come in this way,” Mrs. Sappleton informed Mr. Nuttel. She
continued on cheerfully about the shooting and the insufficiency of birds and
the predictions for duck in the winter, but to Mr. Nuttel, it was all purely
horrible. He made a desperate but only partially successful effort to turn the
talk on to a less frightful topic; he was conscious that his hostess was giving
him only a fragment of her attention, and her eyes were constantly straying
past him to the open window. He felt it an unfortunate coincidence that he
should have paid his visit on this tragic anniversary.
Mr. Nuttel was telling Mrs. Sappleton about his nerve treatment, and
then she suddenly brightened into alert attention- but not to what Mr. Nuttel
was saying. “Here they are at last!” she cried, “Just in time for tea, and
don’t they look as if they were muddy up to their eyes!” Mr. Nuttel shivered
slightly and turned towards the niece with a look intended to express
sympathetic understanding, but the child stared out through the window, dazed
with terror. In a chill shock of nameless fear, he swung around in his seat and
looked in the same direction, and there were three figures walking across the
lawn towards the window, carrying guns under their arms, one with a white coat
hung over his shoulders, followed by a tired, brown spaniel kept close at their
heels. They quietly neared the house, and then a hoarse young voice chanted out
of the dusk: “I said, Bertie, why do you band?” The climax is frightening
because as Mr. Nuttel chats with Mrs. Sappleton, the three hunters and their
dog stroll toward the window, expected by the family, but unexpected and
impossible to comprehend for Mr. Nuttel.
Following the climax is the falling action.
Once Mr. Nuttel saw them coming, he grabbed wildly at his stick and hat; the
hall door, the gravel drive, and the front gate were dimly noted stages in his
head long retreat. The hunters questioned Mrs. Sappleton about who bolted out
as they came up, and she told the guys that Mr. Nuttel was an extraordinary man
who could only talk about his illnesses and dashed off without a word goodbye
or apology. Vera claims to expect it was the spaniel because Mr. Nuttel told
her he had a horror of dogs. According to Vera, he was once hunted into a
cemetery somewhere on the banks of the Ganges
by a pack of outcast dogs and had to spend the night in a newly dug
grave with the creatures snarling, grinning, and foaming just above him.
Romance at short notice was Vera’s specialty.
In conclusion,
the dramatic irony in the story is that the reader knows that Vera’s story is a
lie, and Mr. Nuttel does not. The story’s conflicts include the external
struggle between Mr. Nuttel and Vera and the internal struggle within Mr.
Nuttel between his nervous and reclusive tendencies and his decision to try to
calm his nerves by meeting total strangers. The situational irony occurs when
the hunters return, violating Mr. Nuttel’s expectation that they are dead. When
Mr. Nuttel expects to be welcomed by “nice” people, he instead ends up being
driven away. Also, when Mr. Nuttel expects to calm himself through social
interaction, he becomes highly agitated.
Taken from
In this context Saki uses the word "Romance"
to mean made-up stories of a wild or improbable nature. This meaning of the word is older than the modern association
with falling in love (although this usage was also known in Saki's time.) It
used to be quite common to accuse someone of "romancing" if they told
you a tall or improbable story.
In "The Open Window" Vera has just finished making up a long, elaborate ghost story to scare Frampton, her aunt's visitor - she knows that her uncles will soon be coming home, so she pretends that they have died and their ghosts haunt the house. So of course, when they come home Frampton thinks they are ghosts and runs away screaming.
Vera then explains his sudden departure by telling her realtives that Frampton had run away from her uncle's spanie; because he has a "horror of dogs" due to a terrible experience in india. She only has a few seconds in which to make up this second story, so it's clear that she excels in "Romance at short notice."
In "The Open Window" Vera has just finished making up a long, elaborate ghost story to scare Frampton, her aunt's visitor - she knows that her uncles will soon be coming home, so she pretends that they have died and their ghosts haunt the house. So of course, when they come home Frampton thinks they are ghosts and runs away screaming.
Vera then explains his sudden departure by telling her realtives that Frampton had run away from her uncle's spanie; because he has a "horror of dogs" due to a terrible experience in india. She only has a few seconds in which to make up this second story, so it's clear that she excels in "Romance at short notice."
The Open Window - Analysis
"The Open Window" is Saki's most
popular short story. It was first collected in Beasts and SuperBeasts in 1914.
Saki's wit is at the height of its power in this story of a spontaneous
practical joke played upon a visiting stranger. The practical joke recurs In
many of Saki's stories, but "The Open Window" is perhaps his most
successful and best known example of the type.
Saki dramatizes here the conflict between
reality and imagination, demonstrating how difficult it can be to distinguish
between them. Not only does the unfortunate Mr. Nuttel fall victim to the
story's joke, but so does the reader. The reader is at first inclined to laugh
at Nuttel for being so gullible. However, the reader, too, has been taken in by
Saki's story and must come to the realization that he or she is also inclined
to believe a well-told and interesting tale.
Style
“The Open Window” is the story of a
deception, perpetrated on an unsuspecting, and constitutionally nervous man, by
a young lady whose motivations for lying remain unclear.
Structure
The most remarkable of Saki’s devices in
“The Open Window” is his construction of the story’s narrative. The structure
of the story is actually that of a story-within-a-story. The larger “frame”
narrative is that of Mr. Nuttel’s arrival at Mrs. Sappleton’s house for the
purpose of introducing himself to her. Within this narrative frame is the
second story, that told by Mrs. Sappleton’s niece.
Symbolism
The most important symbol in “The Open
Window” is the open window itself. When Mrs. Sappleton’s niece tells Mr. Nuttel
the story of the lost hunters, the open window comes to symbolize Mrs.
Sappleton’s anguish and heartbreak at the loss of her husband and younger
brother. When the truth is later revealed, the open window no longer symbolizes
anguish but the very deceit itself. Saki uses the symbol ironically by having
the open window, an object one might expect would imply honesty, as a symbol of
deceit.
Narration
“The Open Window” is a third-person
narrative, meaning that its action is presented by a narrator who is not
himself involved in the story. This allows a narrator to portray events from a
variety of points of view, conveying what all of the characters are doing and
what they are feeling or thinking. For most of the story, until he runs from
the house, the reader shares Mr. Nuttel’s point of view. Like Mr. Nuttel, the
reader is at the mercy of
Vera’s story. The reader remains, however,
after Mr. Nuttel has fled and thus learns that Vera’s story was nothing but a
tall tale.
Tall Tale
Vera’s story is essentially a tall tale.
Tall tales are often found in folklore and legend and describe people or events
in an exaggerated manner. Good examples are the story of John Henry and his
hammer, and the story of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. Vera exaggerates the
significance of the open window by making it the centerpiece of a fabricated
tale of tragic loss.
Themes
Though it is a remarkably short piece of
fiction, “The Open Window” explores a number of important themes. Mr. Nuttel
comes to the country in an attempt to cure his nervous condition. He pays a
visit to the home of Mrs. Sappleton in order to introduce himself, and before
he gets to meet the matron of tha house, he is intercepted by her niece, who
regales him with an artful piece of fiction that, in the end, only makes his
nervous condition worse.
Appearances and Reality
It is no surprise that Mrs. Sappleton’s
niece tells a story that is easy to believe. She begins with an object in plain
view, an open window, and proceeds from there. The window is obviously open,
but for the reasons for its being open the reader is completely at the mercy of
Mrs. Sappleton’s niece, at least while she tells her story. The open window
becomes a symbol within this story-within-a-story, and its appearance becomes
its reality. When Mr. Nuttel (and the reader) are presented with a contrary
reality at the end of the story, the result is a tension between appearance and
reality that needs to be resolved: Which is real? Can they both be real?
Deception
Were it not for deception, this story could
not happen. The action and irony of the story revolve around the apparent
deception that Mrs. Sappleton’s niece practices. It remains to be seen,
however, whether this deception is a harmless prank or the result of a sinister
disposition. If the niece’s deception is cruel, then the reader must question
the motives behind the deception practiced by all tellers of stories, including
Saki himself.
Sanity and Insanity
“The Open Window” shows just how fine the
line can be between sanity and insanity. Mr. Nuttel’s susceptibility to deceit
is no different from that of the reader of the story. Yet Mr. Nuttel is insane,
and the reader, presumably, is not. In order to maintain this distinction, Saki
forces his reader to consider the nature of insanity and its causes.
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