A Study Guide for Saki's "The Storyteller"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Saki's "The Storyteller," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535839822

Book preview

12

The Story-Teller

Saki

1914

Introduction

Hector Hugh Munro (who wrote under the pen name Saki) is today one of the most widely read Edwardian writers, beloved by each new generation for his impeccable sense of irony and black humor, although he is better known in his native Britain than in the United States. In his short story The Story-Teller, a thinly veiled image of Saki himself puts a cantankerous old aunt in her place with a fairy tale that subverts fairy tales about a little girl who is eaten by a wolf but, unlike Little Red Riding Hood, is never miraculously rescued. The story is also about the power of language and the advantage it gives the storyteller over his rather feeble opponent, who cannot even control the three small children in her care. But the storyteller can control language and make it do just what he pleases, including making the aunt's ill-chosen words rebound against her. The Story-Teller was first published in Saki's collection Beasts and Super-Beasts, which remains in print today.

Author Biography

Munro (who is thought to have taken the pen name Saki from the cup-bearer in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam) was born on December 18, 1870, at Akyab in Burma (now Myanmar), where his father, Charles Augustus Munro, was stationed. His father, a career officer, eventually became inspector-general of the British police establishment in Burma. In 1872, Munro's mother, Mary Frances (née Mercer), went back to England to have her fourth child, but miscarried and died after being frightened when a bull charged her during a walk in the country. Charles Munro sent his children, Charles, Hector, and Ethel, back to England to live with his mother and sisters. Ethel's memoir of this period suggests the hatred and tensions within the family in which the children became ensnared, as well as the beatings and neglect that they suffered, especially their isolation from other children. When their father returned, he sent Hector on the usual tour of Europe for the sake of his education and, in 1893, secured him a military commission in the army in Burma. But the