THE STORY TELLER H.H. Munro

THE STORY TELLER

 H.H. Munro

      The story teller is one of the famous stories of H.H. Munro.  His pen name is Saki.  The story teller deals with the psychology of children.  Usually children are active and busy.  Their behavior gets on the nerves of the elders.  This psychology of children is reflected in this story.

     An aunt and three children are travelling in a train.  They are on the way to Templecombe.  In the carriage an unknown bachelor observes their behavior.  The aunt is not able to control the children.  The children ask her trouble some questions regarding their surroundings, so the aunt decides to tell them a conventional moral story.  To control the children, the aunt tells them a story of a good girl.  The girl made a lot of friends because of her good character. These people save her from a wild bull.  The aunt tries to derive a moral lesson but the children are not ready to accept the moral.  They call the story stupid.  The Bachelor points out the flaws in aunt’s story.  As the result, he is challenged to tell a better story.  He tells the story of good girl named Bertha who is horribly good.  She has worn three medals for obedience, punctuality and goodness. For the goodness, Bertha is permitted to walk in prince’s park where normally no children are permitted.  He says that there are no sheep in the park there are no flowers in the park.  Bertha entertains herself by walking around the park and listening to her medals clink together.  Suddenly a wolf enters the park. It is black, brown and grey.  It comes to the park to eat a pig.  It sees Bertha.  Bertha runs away from the wolf and hides in a Bush.  She starts to shake from fear causing her medal to make noise, by the medal sound the wolf finds Bertha and eats her.  The man finishes the story with a surprising moral that being good can be bad.  The children praise the man’s story but the aunt’s scolds the man for telling a story which is not appropriate for children.  The man replies that unlike her the story kept them quite for few minutes.  The bachelor gathers his things and leaves the train when he leaves he thinks himself that the children will demand for improper story.

     Thus the story “The Story Teller” provides an antidote to crude didacticism.  It expresses an attitude of cynicism.