The Open Window Essay Questions

It is so brief it has almost the air of a parable about it, except that it’s far from clear what the ‘moral’ of the story is, or even if there is one.

While Mrs Sappleton is upstairs making herself ready to meet their new guest, Vera entertains Framton.

After she learns that Framton knows barely anything about her aunt, Vera tells him that three years ago Mrs Sappleton’s husband and her two brothers went out through the French window on a shooting trip, and never returned.

His sister, worried that he will hide himself away there and ‘mope’, thus making his nerves worse, has given him the names and addresses of all the people she knows in the area, and told him to go and introduce himself to them.

(His sister had stayed at the rectory four years earlier.) ‘The Open Window’ takes place at the house of one of Framton’s sister’s contacts, a woman named Mrs Sappleton and her 15-year-old niece, Vera, whom Framton has gone round to visit so he might introduce himself.

She mentions the open window and explains that her husband and brothers are out shooting but will be back any minute.

They exchange small talk about shooting and birds, and Framton iterates that he has been told to have complete rest and avoid ‘mental excitement’, when Mrs Sappleton announces that her husband and brothers are returning home.At first the passage seems to be quite a poignant event for the reader as the audience is made to feel sympathy for Mrs Sampton. This feeling of sympathy and sadness clearly shows the power the author has over the audience's feelings when later on the reader finds out that it was all a lie intended to scare Framton away. These scores will remain separate and will not be combined with your Reading or Writing and Language Test scores.The scores you receive on the SAT Essay will give you important feedback about your strengths in reading: how well you understood the passage; analysis: how well you analyzed the author’s argument; and writing: how well you structured your response.Your scores will also help you see what you need to work on.You’re in the right place to learn more about the SAT Essay Test – right here on Khan Academy.Although on first glance it seems different from some of Saki’s better-known stories, such as his classic werewolf tale ‘Gabriel-Ernest’ and his story about a polecat worshipped as a god, ‘Sredni Vashtar’, ‘The Open Window’ follows the same essential setup as many of Saki’s other stories, in having an adolescent character whose supposed innocence (supposed by the adult character, that is) turns out to be guile, cunning, and the mischief in disguise.But whereas Nicholas in ‘The Lumber-Room’, Conradin in ‘Sredni Vashtar’, or Gabriel-Ernest actively seek to cause harm to their adult antagonists (or, in the case of Nicholas, to refuse to help an aunt who has got herself trapped in the water tank), Vera’s only weapon is her imagination.They drowned in a ‘treacherous piece of bog’ and their bodies were never recovered. Vera tells Framton that her aunt has kept the French window open ever since, in the belief that her husband and brothers are going to walk back through the open window any moment, alive and well.Mrs Sappleton then arrives from upstairs and apologises for being late coming down.