“You have undermined the effect of years of careful teaching."
Saki’s noted mastery of irony is displayed with this simple accusation by an aunt whose own attempt to tell stories to her young charges as a means of keeping them from growing too restless on a train ride has been controverted by the display of a greater talent exhibited by a stranger. The male passenger’s story does what the aunt’s fails to do; much as organized education fails to do. Consider the aunt a symbol of the system and the passenger a symbol of creativity run amok and perhaps the aunt’s concern fall into sharper focus.
Romance at short notice was her specialty.
The “her” in this case is a young girl named Vera. The entire narrative of “The Open Window” is a fraud told by an imaginative young mind who has already grow too weary of the mundane reality of everyday life to allow it to stop her from enjoying herself. This is the final line of the story and is in reference to the sudden and mysterious exit by the stranger who has just become the latest victim of young Vera’s specialty: creating horrific fictions on a moment’s notice.
"Wolves."
Saki is unquestionably the master of irony. He also proves once again that he’s nothing to sneeze at in the department of great curtain closers. “Wolves” is the final line of this story and out of context may not seem particularly chilling or even all that dramatic. Within the context of all that has come before, however, it would be a fairly difficult argument to make that this is not one of the all-time top ten greatest ironic closing lines in the history of short stories.
"Waldo is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death”
Of course, it is important to understand that Saki’s love of irony did not just inhabit the greater sphere of fantastic endings and life lessons. On more than a few occasions—quite a bit more—he simply couched his ironic view of life within the more familiar environs of sarcasm. And few lines he 0r any other writer ever penned are as deliciously sarcastic as this one. Memorize it, alter the details to fit the occasion at hand and you will find it brings you a big laugh now and then as you move through life.
