Motivation for Telling a Story

In “The Storyteller,” what is the aunt’s motivation for telling the children a story? What is the bachelor’s motivation? How are their motivations similar? How are they different? How does the aunt react at the end of the bachelor’s story?

After reading "The Storyteller," the aunt's motives and the bachelor's motives for telling the story are quite plain. There are four kinds of causes, as set forth by Aristotle, which I learned last year: the material cause, the formal cause, the efficient cause, and the final cause. For this particular question regarding the motives of telling the story, I will examine the final and efficient causes. The efficient cause of something is the "moving cause", or the primary source of change. In this case, both the aunt and the bachelor have the same efficient cause for telling the story: to calm the children down and keep them quiet. This is demonstrated by clear evidence from the text and by inferring from the aunt's actions.

The final cause is something's ultimate aim or purpose. In this case, the aunt's purpose is to, through a story (deplorable and boring, but a story nonetheless) remind them the virtues of proper demeanor and good attitude. The bachelor's purpose, though, is different. He sees the aunt's belief in rigid upbringing and also sees how ludicrous and futile her attempts are to quiet the children, and his purpose of telling his story is because he wants to mess with the aunt and point out the absurdities behind her methods of teaching.

The aunt reacts to the bachelor's story by criticizing him for "undermining years of careful teaching", indicating her belief in rigid upbringing; it is this very subject that Saki criticizes and satirizes through this short story.