27 pages • 54 minutes read
SakiThe Open Window
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1911A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Irony
Irony exists in three forms in “The Open Window.” The name of the protagonist, Vera, is an example of verbal irony. Her name comes from the Latin word for truth, but Vera ironically does nothing but lie.
Framton’s visit to the countryside is meant to cure his nerves by providing a tranquil, slower way of life. Instead, in an example of situational irony, he finds himself in a circumstance that causes further stress and anxiety as he is forced to make visits to strangers. And he is thrown into a nervous fit when this unfamiliarity leads him to believe he sees ghosts. Rather than being tranquil, his visit to the country is stress-inducing.
Dramatic irony is also present. Inferences can be made based on Vera’s line of questioning toward Framton, Framton’s nervous state, and Mrs. Sappleton’s diction and demeanor that foreshadow for the reader that Vera’s story is false. Therefore, the reader knows something the protagonist does not—that the men returning through the window are not ghosts.
Embedded Narrative
“The Open Window” provides a frame narrative containing an embedded narrative, or a story within a story. The purpose of a frame narrative is to give context through which the embedded narrative should be understood. Using an embedded narrative allows Saki to provide multiple perspectives in the overall story. In this case, the frame narrative is told from a third-person limited point of view, while the two embedded narratives are Vera’s first-person narratives.
By offering different perspectives within a single story, Saki can provide insights into the motivations of different characters and clues to the way the text should be interpreted. Saki presents Framton’s nervous condition and Vera’s self-possessed nature in the frame narrative to create an understanding of Vera’s ability to control the situation through the embedded narrative.
Foreshadowing
“The Open Window” foreshadows Vera’s lack of truthfulness by making it clear that Framton should be doubted due to his nerves. When he wonders whether the “formal visits on a succession of total strangers would do much towards helping the nerve cure which he was supposed to be undergoing” (Paragraph 2), the reader is led to understand that he is a severely anxious and continually worried man. Framton also notes that something about the room suggests it is inhabited by a man, but his mind is so easily swayed by nerves that the thought is unable to keep him grounded once Vera begins her tale of tragedy.
Vera’s line of questioning also foreshadows that she might be untruthful. She asks Framton specific questions regarding how much knowledge he has of her aunt and the people of the countryside. That she seeks the limits of his knowledge hints to readers that she will attempt to trick him.
Finally, when Mrs. Sappleton “bustles” into the room speaking “briskly” about the reason for the open window, her description, though somewhat distracted, does not seem to match that of the grieving and distraught widow on the anniversary of her husband and brothers’ deaths as presented in Vera’s story, foreshadowing once again that the perspectives presented by Framton and Vera are unreliable.
Unreliable Narrator
“The Open Window” has an unreliable third-person, limited narrator. The narration mostly focuses on Framton’s thoughts and motivations, and as a result, his nervousness bleeds into it—because he is easily misled, the reader may be misled, too. Additionally, when Vera tells her story from the first-person perspective in the embedded narrative, she lies. Because the narrator is focused on Framton, her lie is convincing enough to mislead him, thus tricking the reader too. By using an unreliable narrator who withholds the fact that Vera’s specialty is “romance at short notice” until the story’s end (Paragraph 29), Saki creates a story with greater depth. In the end, readers might find themselves rereading the story and discovering the many clues the narrator leaves that all is not as it seems.
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