27 pages • 54 minutes read
Saki, H. H. MunroThe Storyteller
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1914A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Question of Truth
The children do not respond well to the aunt’s story, not merely because it is boring but because on a fundamental level, it is dishonest: It is not true. Though the children cannot articulate this in words, it is clear they feel this lack when they compare it to the truth they feel in the bachelor’s story. When he describes Bertha as “horribly good,” the children feel that description contains a truth that is “absent from the aunt’s tale of infant life” (Paragraph 31). Where the bachelor tells a story they believe contains some kind of honesty, the aunt’s story relies on trite platitudes about the external rewards of good behavior.
Instantly, the children (and the bachelor) can dissect the untruth of the aunt’s story. Where the aunt’s story argues that the little girl is only saved from a rampaging bull because the people admire her goodness, the bigger of the two girls demands: “Wouldn’t they have saved her if she hadn’t been good?” (Paragraph 15). The girl, like the bachelor, surmises that most people would not let a little girl be killed by a bull, whether she had been good or not. Therefore, her goodness has very little bearing on the story’s outcome, and the aunt’s implication that only goodness will be rewarded is false and worthy of their derision.
Judging by the children’s reluctance to listen to the aunt’s story to begin with, one can also surmise that her other stories tend to lean in this direction as well. This is reinforced by her comment at the end that the bachelor’s “improper story” has undermined years of teaching. This implies that she has been telling the same kinds of moralizing stories to the children for years. This fact also calls the truth and values of these stories into question since years of hearing them have not improved the children’s behavior. Through this, Munro uses subtext to critique moralizing instructional tales.
The bachelor, sensing this after listening to the aunt’s story, counteracts this falsity with a story that leans, even in its absurdity, toward a deeper truth that the children will appreciate. The children do appreciate it, calling the story “beautiful,” the first positive remark they make. However, it is not immediately clear what the children mean by “beautiful.” The children may find Bertha’s gruesome death “beautiful”; children do often delight in the macabre. Yet the previous statement about hearing a “ring of truth” hints that the children find the story beautiful because they can sense an inherent truth in it that was lacking in their aunt’s story. What precisely that “truth” is can be interpreted in a few different ways, but in any case, the fact of its existence in the story is important to the children. “The Story-Teller” argues not only that children can sense when adults are telling them the truth, but also that is it better to be truthful with children rather than sugarcoat life’s complexities and dark undercurrents with insincere “moral” lessons.
The Unfairness of Life
If the children appreciate the bachelor’s story because they sense a fundamental truth within it, the question becomes what the truth might be. One answer is that life is unfair, so being good will not necessarily protect one from harm or evil. In direct opposition to the aunt’s story, which claims that the little girl’s goodness leads directly to her being saved by a crowd of people, the bachelor’s story argues that there is no direct correlation between good behavior and a favorable outcome or safety. After all, despite all of Bertha’s goodness, she is still attacked and eaten by a wolf, and there is no one to save her.
In fact, one might suppose the inverse to be true: Good behavior can lead to bad outcomes. This is supported by the fact that Bertha’s symbols of goodness, her three medals, lead directly to the wolf finding and killing her. Read in this way, the wolf also symbolizes this supreme unfairness, a literal punishment for Bertha’s good behavior. As Bertha herself realizes, if she had not been so good, she would not be in the park for the wolf to find and kill her. Thus, her only real “reward” for her perfect goodness is the appearance of evil and danger, and ultimately her death. Here, the wolf also subverts fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood, in which the wolf punishes children for misbehaving or disobedience. By reframing a classic villain as indiscriminately violent, Munro asserts that following the rules does not guarantee protection.
This interpretation is upheld not only by Bertha’s story but by the frame narrative as well. If one supposes that the aunt means well with her story—that there is goodness (even if misguided) in the lessons she is trying to impart to the children—then it also follows that the bachelor is her punishment for those good intentions. Like the wolf in Bertha’s story, the bachelor becomes the antagonist who upends all the aunt’s efforts and punishes her with the bad outcome that “for the next six months or so those children will assail her in public with demands for an improper story” (Paragraph 62). In both cases, the story makes it clear that goodness will not always, or perhaps ever, be rewarded, and good intentions are often met with those who will take advantage or punish you for it.
The Point of Goodness
If good behavior does not guarantee positive outcomes or rewards, the value of being good is called into question. If it can be agreed that external rewards are not the point of goodness or virtue, then there are two options. Either there is no point to goodness at all, or goodness should be its own reward.
Based on the theme of unfairness and the outcomes afforded each character, it is easy to conclude that there is no point in being good in any case. The bachelor, for instance, though he is outwardly polite, does not seem particularly good and suffers no ill effects for it. Nor does the wolf in the bachelor’s story. It is implied by the bachelor’s last observation: “[T]hose children will assail her public with demands for an improper story!” (Paragraph 62), the children will continue to be ill-behaved, and the only person likely to suffer from that eventuality is the aunt. At no point in either the bachelor’s story or the frame story does the text offer any solid reason that goodness should be the end goal for these three children (or the reader). These facts can lead one to interpret that there’s no point in goodness.
However, Munro’s story does not disavow goodness so much as complicate it, mirroring the way the real world is rarely “black and white.” One example of this is the children’s philosophical question about their aunt’s story. The aunt first states that the townspeople only save the protagonist’s life because she is well-behaved, but such an assertion calls society’s morality as a whole into question—it would be immoral to let a child die simply for being disobedient. The aunt admits as much after some questioning, and while it seems like a failure for her, this scene underlines a faith in society rather than a sense of nihilism; most people are generally good and will take care of each other.
Doing good is also complicated by the bachelor. Despite shooting nasty looks at the aunt and telling the children a story that excites their sense of mischief, telling the story in and of itself is a good act. Rather than punishing the aunt and children by calling the conductor, which he considers doing, he entertains the children by telling them a story that captures their imagination. He allows them to ask questions, and he’s invested in their engagement, pausing “to let the children imagine all of the great things about the park” (Paragraph 44). While the bachelor does not believe in uncritical obedience, he is also not a villain. He is not helping the aunt out of a sense of obligation, but he enjoys telling the story and the way the children receive it, implying that a good act done for its own sake is something positive.
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