Short Fiction · Chapter
Who Was to Blame? explained
A comedic yet poignant story about a kitten whose natural instincts are thwarted by his owner's misguided training methods.
What happens
A comedic yet poignant story about a kitten whose natural instincts are thwarted by his owner's misguided training methods. The narrator reflects on how his uncle's harsh teaching of Latin similarly destroyed his own enthusiasm for classical literature, drawing a parallel between the kitten's fear of mice and the narrator's fear of classical works.
Themes in this chapter
Hypocrisy and Moral Failure
The uncle's attempt to 'train' the kitten is hypocritical; he blames the kitten for not catching mice but his own brutal methods cause the failure.
Suffering and Compassion
The kitten suffers from the uncle's cruel training, and the narrator empathizes with the kitten's plight, drawing a parallel to his own suffering under the same uncle's teaching.
Characters to notice
- Pyotr Demyanitch
The narrator's uncle, a lean, bilious Latin teacher who attempts to train a kitten to catch mice using a mousetrap, but his harsh methods only frighten the kitten.
- The Narrator
The first-person narrator who reflects on his own experience of being taught Latin by his uncle, comparing himself to the frightened kitten.
Key passages
“Alas! sometimes I feel myself in the ludicrous position of the flying cat. Like the kitten, I had in my day the honour of being taught Latin by my uncle.”
The narrator compares his own fear of classical literature to the kitten's fear of mice, both resulting from his uncle's harsh teaching methods.
This paraphrase captures the central analogy of the story.