A chill ran down Framton's spine.
(a) What does the above line mean? class 6th the open window
Answers
Explanation:
Framton Nuttel is a single man in a new town. His sister has arranged for him to meet several of her acquaintances to prevent him from becoming lonely there. On one such visit, Vera, the 15-year-old niece of Framton’s latest host, Mrs. Sappleton, invites him to sit and wait with her while her aunt readies. As he waits, Framton anxiously thinks about an appropriate way to
At that moment, Framton grabs his belongings and bolts out of the house, narrowly escaping a collision with a passing cyclist on the street.
One of the men, presumably Mr. Stapleton, asks Mrs. Stapleton about Framton’s quick exit. She explains that the fleeing man is named Mr. Nuttel and wonders why he looked as though “he had seen a ghost” (227).
Just then, Vera interjects that it must have been the dog that frightened Framton. She then tells a short, extravagant story detailing Framton’s supposed deep phobia of dogs stemming from an awful incident in which a pack of dogs chased him through a South Asian cemetery and forced him to hide away all night in a freshly-dug grave.
Analysis
The story has a tripartite structure: the first part beginning with the conversation between Vera and Framton, the second with the entrance of the aunt, and the third with the return of the hunting party (Peltzie 703). Saki employs flashback to divide these three parts, interrupting the present with a story-within-a-story inspired by Vera’s imagined past. Like many of Saki’s stories, “The Open Window” features a surprise ending when the reader discovers that Vera, whose name signifies veracity (i.e. truth), is ironically anything but truthful (Marcus 4).
Just as Vera tricks Framton, so Saki tricks readers by leading them to believe that Vera is a credible storyteller. He does this in part by making Vera a young girl. In Saki’s time it was rare for a woman to be portrayed as “cunning” or “conniving” (Gibson 170-171). Rather, women and girls were frequently cast as the more trustworthy characters, whereas men and boys were the rascals. By casting the troublemaker as female in his story, Saki counters stereotypes about the proper way for young women to behave (Gibson 161).
Though this story does cast a girl as troublemaker, Vera’s brand of troublemaking is distinct from that of Saki’s male characters in other stories. She relies on her imagination to execute pranks whereas Saki’s boy characters usually rely on destruction or aggression (Byrne 195). Saki’s characterization of Vera also provides some clues to the careful reader about Vera’s true nature. Chief among them is his characterization of Vera as a storyteller whose specialty is “[r]omance at short notice” (Saki 227; Gibson 159). Critics have often understood Vera to be a representation of Saki himself and a “personification of narrative ‘authority’” (Gibson 159).
Vera is also an important character in “The Open Window” because she introduces childhood, a theme common in many of Saki’s stories. Saki frequently portrays childhood as an unfortunate state of children being trapped in a boring, adult world. This perspective stems, in part, from H.H. Munro’s own upbringing. Like many of Saki’s children, Vera is under the watch of the aunt, an imposing figure from whom she desires escape (and achieves it through imaginative storytelling and trickery). The window is a representation of this desire to escape. It is a symbolic window to a different world through which Vera can travel into an alternate reality entirely of her own making. In this way, Vera’s tall tales are a means of escapism from life in the boring, adult world.
Saki’s stories frequently satirize and subvert the order of the Edwardian upper-middle class world of which H.H. Munro was a part. In “The Open Window” he does this by troubling and transforming the “rural” and calm setting of the formal house visit. Vera’s story imbues the otherwise mannered and bourgeois scene with a grim tale of death and delusion. The tale becomes darker still when the aunt enters because Saki continues to describe the setting as a cheerful one even amidst the aunt’s clear and tragic misunderstanding. Using words like “bustled," “whirl," and “cheerfully," Saki subverts the traditional setting of the Edwardian sitting room with the grotesque. This transformation is necessary to liven up the boring and mundane life in Edwardian society.