To illustrate this, I used phoenix imagery depicting the novel being born from the “grey, smouldering ash” of the writer. In using this image of burning I wanted to create the sense of loss and renewal that comes upon the publishing of literature as the reader can now take over and interpret the writing in new ways. The climax of my short story is when the two narratives meet and the boy strangles the author in a role-reversal of character and writer.The ending is foreshadowed through the description of the seasons, something which Saki uses to create macabre humour in ‘The Reticence of Lady Anne’. Saki references ‘winter’, a season traditionally used as a symbol of death, as well as describing Lady Anne as “rather elaborately rigid”, which we find out is due to rigor mortis, and in doing so creates humour because we do not initially treat this as an odd description; so, an aristocratic pose is analogous to a dead one. In my piece the “... short, green shoots beginning” in the greenhouse are meant to represent an artificial spring, while the outside reality is full of the “crimson leaves” of autumn showing that winter and death is approaching rather than having already arrived as in Saki’s work. Amain theme of my short story was the class struggle between the aristocratic writer and the working-class boy. However, whereas Saki only looks at the decay of the aristocracy, I looked at both characters’ situations. In ‘The Reticence of Lady Anne’, Egbert tries to take “... as central a position on the hearth-rug as Don Tarquinio could be persuaded to concede him”, showing the fact that he is even inferior to the cat. In my story I put this into the idea of a class struggle, illustrated by the phrase “the changing of the guard”. This is an aggrandised description through the boy’s eyes of the staff at the castle going off duty, but is also meant to imply that the society of the boy is overtaking that of the writer. To depict the divide between these two societies, I set up a binary opposition between them through the use of antithetical settings, in which the writer lives in his “crumbling castle sat
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