G.C.E. O/L Literature -Short Story - The Lumber Room


The Lumber Room

By Saky




Hector Hugh Munro was born on 18 December 1870 and died on13 November 1916. He was better known by the pen name, Saki. He was a British writer whose witty and mischievous stories satirized the society and culture. He is considered a master of the short story. Munro’s father was an officer in the Burma Police. After the death of his mother when he was two years, he was raised by his aunts who frequently resorted to corporal punishment. He was brought up in a regime of strictness and severity. This left an indelible mark on his character, and is immortalized in a number of short stories, especially The Lumber Room.


Before we start the discussion I would like to you to think over the following.

 • Have you ever been punished at home?

• What was the reason for the punishment?

• What was the punishment given?

• Who gave the punishment?

• How did you respond to the punishment?

• How did the other members of the family respond to it?

• How did you behave after the punishment?

If you have read the story  you can listen to this reading as well.

 

 Reading the  short story and try to answer the following questions 

to understand the short story.

      

  1.  Why was Nicholas ‘’in disgrace’’?
  2. What was the punishment given to Nicholas?
  3.    In what manner did his aunt attempt to hurt Nicholas?
  4.    What made Nicholas happy at the departure of his cousins?
  5.    How did the aunt try to prevent him from entering the gooseberry       garden?
  6.    How did Nicholas make his aunt suspicious of what he was trying to do?
  7.    What compelled him to enter the lumber room?
  8.   How did he enter it?
  9.  What wonderful things were there for his eyes to feast on?
  10.  What feelings did he experience about the details of the tapestry?
  11.  What made Nicholas leave the lumber room?
  12. What had happened to the aunt?
  13. How did Nicholas respond to the requests of the aunt?
  14. How was the aunt rescued finally?
  15. What had made the expedition to the beach punitive?
  16. What is revealed by the thoughts of Nicholas at the end of the story?

Let’s learn the new words found in the story.

1.          Lumber room         - store room/a room where old furniture is kept



2.        Disgrace                  - the lose of respect of others

3.        Frivolous                 - not having any value or importance

4.        Alleged                     - believed to be true or have

5.         Profoundly             - greatly

6.        Tactician                 - a person who is clever in applying                                                                   various  methods in achieving something

8.        Unwarranted         - not justified

9.           Forfeited                 - deprived of

10.        Improvise               - make something with what one has

11.          Rigorously             - severely

12.     Debarred                - banned/prohibited

13.     Unrivalled              - greater or better than all others

14.    Depravity                - prevent somebody from getting something

15.     Expedition              - a tour to explore an area

16.    Scarped                    - injured

17.         Scrambling            - move quickly or awkwardly

18.      Elation                  - happiness

19.      Characterized     - studied the qualities of something

20.          Glorious               - beautiful and splendid

21.       Chuckle                - laugh

22.           Obstinacy             - disobedience/stubbornness

23.           Trivial                  - unimportant/small in size

24.           Forbidden           - prohibited

25.           Concentration     - mindfulness

26.           Stealth                  - secrete

27.           Evade                    - get away/avoid

28.           Execution             - carrying out

29.           Germinated         - grew up

30.          Unauthorized     - without

31.      Intrusion            - going into a place without the

32.           permission illumination - lighting up

33.           Consign              - put aside

34.           Tapestry              - hard rough cloth with a design on it

35.           Transfixed          - still/ unmoved

36.           Quiver                - strange/unusual

37.           Ridiculously      - very silly or unreasonable

38.           Tight corner     - difficult situation

39.           Aromatic           - having a strong smell

40.          Goblins                 - mischievous ugly elf

41.    Vociferation             - expressing opinions forcefully

42.     fire screen        -     a form of furniture that acted as a shield                                                        between the occupants of a room and                                                            the fireplace, and its primary function was to                                               reduce the discomfort of excessive heat from a                                             log fire. 


The Plot

The Exposition 

The story begins with the Orientation or introduction. This is also called exposition .It tells who or what the story is about or it exposes the characters: the main character and the other subordinate characters. The main character is also called the protagonist. It tells about the appearance, behaviour and qualities of the characters. The exposition also tells about the background of the story or the setting. When and where the events of the story take place.

Nicholas gets into disgrace with his aunt. So his cousins are to be taken to Jagborough sands that afternoon and he has to stay at home. The aunt was absolutely sure that the boy will get into the gooseberry garden and orders him not to enter it.

The Complication  

The story continues with the Complication. It unfolds the main events and introduces the crisis or a problem.


Nicholas gets into the lumber room,(it is a store room for extra furniture, but other items too may be stored there) a storehouse of unimagined treasure. Every single item brings life and imagination to Nicholas and is symbolic of what the adults of the real world lack. The tapestry awakens his imagination to a great extent. The pots and candlesticks stir up his creative mind and lastly a large square book, full of pictures of birds, makes it a superb expedition for him.

The Climax  

The most intense, exciting, or important point of the story. That is the peak of the unfolded situations.

While Nicholas is admiring the coloring of a mandarin duck, the voice of his aunt comes from the gooseberry garden. She has slipped into the rainwater tank and cannot get out. She commands the boy to bring her ladder and he ignores it saying that it may be the sound of the Evil One. The aunt realizes that her punishment has boomeranged on her.

 

The Resolution

The story ends in the resolution. It resolves the crisis or the problem    

The furious aunt maintains the frozen silence of one who has suffered undignified detention in a rain water tank for thirty five minutes. Nicholas is also silent in the absorption of an enchanting picture of a hunter and a stag. (This could be symbolic)



Appreciation and enjoyment

 

The whole short story can be divided into two parts:

 The child’s world and the adult’s world. 

The author seems to be suggesting that adulthood causes one to lose all sense of fun, imagination. 

 



Some  important points to remember


• The aunt is obsessed with punishing and nitpicking the children.

 • Nicholas imagines the whole story behind the tapestry while the aunt comes out with boring stories and ideas like a circus or going to the beach-(the humdrum vs. creative; the conventional vs. new)

• She tries to convince Nicholas about the fun of a trip to the beach, of the circus, but lacks the imagination to sound convincing.

 • She describes the beach outing as beautiful and glorious but cannot say in detail how beautiful or glorious it would be because she is not creative.

 • The Lumber room is symbolic of fun and imagination of the child’s world which is definitely lacking in the adult world. It emphasizes the frustration and pain that adulthood and pride can bring.

• She puts punishment and withholding of enjoyment as more important than getting to know the children and moulding their lives.

 • She keeps all the beautiful and creative things of the house locked away in a lumber room seemingly not to spoil them.

 • The purpose of the objects which is to beautify the house is lost, leaving the house dull and colourless.

• The children are deprived of beauty and imagination


 Let’s look at the characters we encounter in this short story

 

Nicholas

 

 

Nicholas is the chief character.  

We first meet him when he is playing tricks on his relatives (putting a frog in his bowl of bread and milk) and this is how he appears throughout the story. 

Everything Nicholas does is about testing the limits of authority.   

His point is that the "older and wiser and better people" represented by his self-styled aunt did not believe there could be a fog in his bread and milk, and there was! Nicholas makes his "aunt" furious because her punishments have no power over his lively, curious and imaginative nature.   

Left at home while the other children are out "enjoying" themselves in adult-sanctioned ways, Nicholas discovers a world of pure freedom and joy in the lumber-room - significantly, a place where adults seldom go and which they don't care about.   He secures his afternoon of freedom by tricking the aunt, turning her nosiness and eagerness to punish her. The story ends with Nicholas in disgrace as usual, but completely untroubled by it as he silently revels in his private, free world of imagination.  

 

The Aunt

 



The aunt is a wet blanket, a spoil-sport. She is an unimaginative self-proclaimed adult who demonstrates a very negative attitude towards children. We can infer it from her habit of devising 'treats' for the children for the sole purpose of excluding one or all of them as a punishment. She presumably does this in order to assert her authority. From a child's point of view, she is an infuriating grown-up - she often does not listen when the children tell her things, and changes the subject when challenged.

She is a small minded woman of few ideas, with immense powers of concentration. Nicholas is self-willed, stubborn and equally obsessive (about getting into the Lumber Room, and about thwarting the aunt) but he is a small boy. The aunt's obsession (with outwitting Nicholas) is revealed as actually very childish.

Nicholas is the 'hero' of this subtly subversive story.  The aunt is the 'foil' against which Nicholas's character emerges - a boy of many ideas, imagination and quick wits. We applaud rather than condemn Nicholas's disobedience and his triumph in this war of wills, mostly because the aunt's behaviour is revealed as absurd, and she appears to deserve her 'punishment'.

 

What are the literary techniques used by the author?

• Third person narration 

• A chronological order in the plot

• Use of a large variety of epithets to highlight the child’s world and the grown-up’s world   (grim chuckle, alleged frog, unknown land, stale delight, mere material pleasure, bare and cheerless, thickly growing vegetation)

(Frivolous ground, considerable obstinacy, trivial gardening operation, and unauthorized intrusion).

• Use of Metaphors

A circus of unrivalled merit and uncounted elephants (to lay stress on the Aunt’s narrow – mindedness)  

The flawlessness of the reasoning, self-imposed sentry-duty (characterizes the Aunt as a very strict person)   

• Use of Rhetorical Questions

But did the huntsman see, what Nicholas saw, that four galloping wolves were coming in his direction through the wood?

 

What are the themes Saki wanted to bring out?

• Stupidity, moral degradation, hypocrisy and ambition boomerang on the person who emits them in a hostile manner.

• Children may be more innovative than the adults.

• The adults must be very careful in punishing the children.

• Generation gap.

• Using religion to instill fear.


Reference:

Teacher Instructional Manual

Internet




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