The story under analysis, the Name-Day by Saki, tells us about a man called Abbleway who tries not to be engaged in any adventures in his life. Once, though, he travels to another city by a train in a snowy day, and his carriage becomes separated from the other part of the train, and he is left with a peasant woman in the woods. He is afraid of the probability of being eaten by wolves, and she confirms his suspicions telling him the story about her aunt devoured here. She is sure, though, that she has nothing to be afraid of, because of her name-day. She sells him part of her food much more expensive that it really costs and finally leaves the carriage. Wolves attack her, bur a miracle happened – they do not eat her. It is when Abbleway realizes that wolves are dogs, and the woman has fooled him.

The story is written in a sarcastic tone, which can be proved by the extensive use of such devices as irony, hyperbole, pun, etc. to mock at such people as Abbleway. First of all, the beginning of the story contains antithesis. It shows that the real life often differs from the one we are told about in proverbs and sayings. There is also a pun in the second sentence — the word “constitutionally” can mean both “naturally” and “legally”, which, since Abbleway is an Englishman, can be the mocking at the stereotypes about English people, saying that it is allegedly written in some sort of a constitution.

The author also repeats some words to achieve the comic effect, such as “adventurous” and “non-adventurous” in the aforementioned antithesis. If the latter were omitted, the phrase would not be that entertaining. The same can be said about the pair of phrases “mad dog” and “Mad Mullah” (zeugma). In the first case “mad” is an unnecessary property of a dog, but in the second it is a part of a nickname given to a man. And the difference in the structure helps to maintain the comic effect. The name Mad Mullah, by the way, belongs to a Somali religious leader who used to attack English-friendly tribes to rob them. It gives us a hint to the continuation of the story, when there appears an allegedly religious woman who sincerely believes that nothing can happen to her in her name-day and eventually turns out extorting money from a fellow passenger by fraud. This zeugma also means that Abbleway is afraid of literally everything.

Turning back to Abbleway, we can say that he does not like adventures so much that he even considers his errand to Vienna an exile, which is irony taking into account that many people in his shoes would consider it carrier-useful experience. He also likes exaggerating, and we can trace it in the whole story, For example, a journey to Fiume he adds to the list of his life’s adventures, and his engagement to a woman he calls “hazardous undertaking”.

The next hint to what happens later is in the paragraph, where Abbleway’s fiancée invites him to Fiume. She calculated that “the journey did not appear likely to be expensive”, but it will be, in fact, expensive, which is also ironical.

Humour of the situation is also present here. For example, Abbleway tries to talk to a peasant woman in Slavonic languages, while many people in his place would just use the language they usually speak. He goes from Austria, where people speak German, and it would be the rights choice, but he clearly thinks too much and — again — exaggerates. Then he does it when he sees so-called ‘wolves’. “There are hundreds of them”, he says, but in fact, there are only two. So, he is a victim of his own imagination and a vicious woman who basically robbed him out of his money.

At the end it turns out that the woman knows the dogs and their owner. She says that she didn’t want to take Abbleway to her cousin’s inn, because he is “always grasping with strangers”. The story ends with a sentence ”Abbleway did not have the opportunity for finding out whether Karl was really avaricious”, which shows that it is a family thing. It is not accidentally that when they had just met, the woman had told him about her aunt a pig, since the pig is a symbol or avarice.

There is also the effect of defeated expectancy in the story. At least there was a moment when I personally thought that the story was going to be about a religious woman and her obstinate stupidity and that she would be eaten by wolves for that. But it turned out the author managed to fool me as the woman did it to Abbleway, and he happened to be stupid, because he had left a lot of money in her favour.

So, I thing in the story the author tries to tell us that one should not be too hysterical about some things as well as one should not consider oneself superior in some situations (which Abbleway, obviously, did), otherwise it might turn bad for one.