The Men Who Shouldn't Come Home

This post contains spoilers about the short stories The Open Window and The Monkey's Paw.

Death is an inevitable part of life, we all know that. But what would you do, or could you think, if you saw someone who you knew was dead walk again? This might be harder to take in than the person dieing in the first place. Seeing someone dead and then seeing them walking again would be beyond reasoning. We know that once someone has passed, they don't come back. This belief is a part of our understanding of life. So what would you do if someone you knew was dead came walking in your front door?

I decided to read The Open Window by H.H. Munro. Many (well... maybe most) people would not interpret this story the way I did, which is their translation. Towards the beginning of the story, everything seemed to be normal with a simple exchange between Framton Nuttel and Vera about the loss of her aunt's husband and two younger brothers. What struck me as odd was that Vera had said that when the brothers and husband had drowned in the marsh that "Their bodies were never recovered." The story takes on a more solemn tone when Mrs. Sappleton remarks gleefully that her "husband and brothers will be home directly from shooting". Believing she had lost her mind, Framton thought the talk of the "shooting and the scarcity of the birds" was "purely horrible". The atmosphere turns ghastly when Mrs. Sappleton exclaims, "Here they are at last!" As Framton turned to look, he spotted three silhouettes "walking across the lawn towards the window" "in the deepening twilight". Not knowing what to do, Framton simply grabs his belongings and dashes out the door.

After I read The Open Window, I immediately thought of the story The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs. The Monkey's Paw in a nutshell is about Mr. White wishing for two hundred pounds because his friend, who gave him the paw, had told him to "wish for something sensible." Perhaps completely in coincidence, Mr. White receives two hundred pounds at the cost of his only son's life. A week after burying their son, Mrs. White demands that Mr. White wish for their son to be alive again. With much fear and demanding by his spouse, Mr. White wishes that his son was alive again. At that exact moment, there is a subtle knock at the door that resounds throughout the house.

I believe I made a connection between these two stories because of implied ideas about the living dead. Is there really a correct way to react to seeing someone you knew was dead walk again?

After research here, here, and here I realized that I horribly misunderstood the story of The Open Window. Vera's story and reaction when the men came home fooled me and if you knew me, you would know that I take everything anybody says very seriously and that I am very gullible. This would contribute to how I can not sense sarcasm unless it is extremely excessive. I believed Vera's story because she broke her self-possessed composure with a little shudder at the end of her story and a look of horror when she saw the husband and two younger brothers coming back from their hunt. When Mrs. Sappleton exclaimed that the men "looked as if they were muddy up to their eyes!", I believed that this was implying that the men had crawled out of the ground. However, we learn more from our failures than our triumphs.