The Complete Short Stories of Saki Literary Elements

Short stories

Most of Saki’s short stories share one of two common settings: either an upper-middle-class British home or the home of a British family in India. These familiar settings are subject to change, of course. One of his most anthologized stories, “The Interlopers,” takes place in the Carpathian forest. “The Storyteller” features stories-within-a-story in which the framing story occurs on a railway train in transit.

Narrative point of view in a Saki short story tends to be from the third-person perspective. Often the narration will be loose and conversational with occasional expressions of personal opinions.

Saki is a recognized master of the ironic tone as most of the narrative move inexorably toward a “twist” ending. The mood is often lightly macabre as the plots routinely plot clever children against cruel adults.

An inordinate number of stories in Saki’s canon cast a clever child as the protagonist engaged in a battle of wits and will against a middle-aged, dominant woman as the antagonist. It has been suggested that this recurring element reflects an unhappy childhood in which Saki was raised by two controlling aunts.

Conflicts vary according to the story and represent a wide range of possibilities. “The Lumber Room” pits a young boy who is “in disgrace” against ruthlessly authoritarian aunt intent on ensuring her punishment does not go unheeded. “The Open Window” pits an imaginative young girl against a hapless young man looking for a cure for his nervousness who is manipulated by her fictions. “The Interlopers” begins with what appears to be a man versus man conflict only to wind up becoming men versus nature.

The climax of the standard Saki is one featuring an ironic inversion of expectations. “Mrs. Packletide’s Tiger” ends with the revelation that the seemingly mousy and painfully loyal paid companion of the title character is actually quite cunning and devious and the story ends with her enjoying a summer cottage earned by blackmailing Mrs. Packletide.

Saki often engages foreshadowing in a very subtly ironic way. A good example occurs about midway through “Sredni Vashtar” when yet one of the unpleasant authoritarian matrons in Saki’s body of work observes that the young protagonist is not eating the toast he loves so much and receives so rarely. To her query “I thought you liked toast” young Conradin replies noncommittally, “Sometimes.” This foreshadows the final, profoundly ironic and somewhat disturbing image in the story of Conradin calmly making himself another piece of toast amid the screams arising from the discovery of the horrifyingly gruesome scene of matronly guardian’s dead body.

In addition to irony, understatement is another literary device which Saki mastered. One of the most memorable and famous is the line which brings “The Open Window” to a close. The story is about a young girl whose fanciful fictions have driven a stranger to her home already on the verge of a nervous breakdown over the edge: “Romance at short notice was her specialty.”

The entire plot of “A Matter of Sentiment” is based on allusion to the geopolitical situation in Europe at the time of composition. With its story about backing the right horse in a literal race, it comes very near to being an allegory on the wisdom of wagering on how the intensifying conflict with the growing strength of Germany would eventually turn out.

The most dominant recurring imagery in the short fiction of Saki drives the narrative of some of his most memorable stories. That imagery is the domineering, authoritarian, repressed matronly women who consistently act to suppress the imagination and freedom of young protagonists.

“The Cupboard of Yesterdays” is structured as an ironic conversation about the nostalgic good old days of war. One of the characters makes one of the most paradoxical observations to be found anywhere in the works of Saki: “Those who wished to see life had a decent opportunity for seeing death at the same time."

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“Tobermory” is one of the author’s most famous stories. It is literally about the personification of the title character, a cat that develops the ability to speak. That ability is expressed almost entirely through simple honesty which just so happens to reveal secrets that the humans around the cat would rather not be exposed. The personification of Tobermory in effect becomes a deeper personification of the abstract concept of hypocrisy.