What Do You Know About Nicholas In The Lumber Room By Saki?

In Saki's "The Lumber Room," Nicholas is the chief character. We first meet him when he is defying authority and playing tricks on his relatives (putting a frog in his bowl of bread and milk) and this is how he appears throughout the story. It is noticeable that everything Nicholas does is about testing the limits of authority/ adult knowledge - his point is that the "older and wiser and better people" represented by his self-styled aunt didn't believe there could be a frog in his bread and milk, and there was!

Nicholas makes his "aunt" furious because her punishments have no power over his lively, curious and imaginative nature. Left at home while the other children are out "enjoying" themselves in adult-sanctioned ways, Nicholas discovers a world of pure freedom and joy in the lumber-room - significantly, a place where adults seldom go and which they don't care about. He secures his afternoon of freedom by tricking the aunt, turning her nosiness and eagerness to punish against her.

The story ends with Nicholas in disgrace as usual, but completely untroubled by it as he silently revels in his private, anarchic world of the imagination.

One morning, a boy called Nicholas doesn't want to eat his breakfast, and puts a frog in his bowl.His distant aunt gives out to him for this, and Nicholas's two cousins and younger brother are taken to the seaside at Jagbourough, while he has to remain at home as a punishment.

When the other children have left, Nicholas's distant aunt goes to work in the garden and commands him to stay out of the gooseberry garden.Nicholas instead takes the key from a shelf in the library and sneaks into the lumber room, where he is never allowed to go.He has lots of fun in the lumber room.He sees lots of beautiful and strange objects, such as old ornaments, tapestries, and a teapot shaped like a duck. He finds a big book with pictures of birds in it. While he is looking at a picture of a duck, the aunt screams for him.Nicholas finds that she has fallen into a tank of water, and refuses to help her out on the grounds that she is an impostor.

Nicholas's cousins and brother come back from the sea in a very bad mood.They have had no fun at all because the tide was in and one of them had sore feet.The aunt was rescued from the watertank by a kitchen maid after more than half an hour.Only Nicholas is happy because he is thinking of a tapestry depicting hounds and a stag.

To start you off, here are some possible ways to describe Nicholas. He is intelligent, as seen by the way he tricks his aunt. His vivid imagination is shown when he makes up stories about the tapestry in the lumber room. The incident with the frog in the bread-and-milk shows him to be rebellious and individual. Throughout the story Saki associates Nicholas with nature, animals, bright colors and so on.

Hope this is of some use.