The Storyteller

The children do not respond well to the aunt’s story, not merely because it is boring but because on a fundamental level, it is dishonest: It is not true. Though the children cannot articulate this in words, it is clear they feel this lack when they compare it to the truth they feel in the bachelor’s story. When he describes Bertha as “horribly good,” the children feel that description contains a truth that is “absent from the aunt’s tale of infant life” (Paragraph 31). Where the bachelor tells a story they believe contains some kind of honesty, the aunt’s story relies on trite platitudes about the external rewards of good behavior.

Instantly, the children (and the bachelor) can dissect the untruth of the aunt’s story. Where the aunt’s story argues that the little girl is only saved from a rampaging bull because the people admire her goodness, the bigger of the two girls demands: “Wouldn’t they have saved her if she hadn’t been good?” (Paragraph 15). The girl, like the bachelor, surmises that most people would not let a little girl be killed by a bull, whether she had been good or not. Therefore, her goodness has very little bearing on the story’s outcome, and the aunt’s implication that only goodness will be rewarded is false and worthy of their derision.