For Monday: James, "O, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad"

The full text of the story: http://www.thin-ghost.org/items/show/150

Group "C" should answer TWO of the following: 

Q1: Unlike the other stories we’ve read, the narrator isn’t one of the characters, and yet he talks directly to the reader and even interrupts the story several times. Why do you think James does this? How might the intrusive narrator be important to the reality or atmosphere of the story?

Q2: The author, M.R. James, was himself a university professor and lifelong academic. Why do you think he made his protagonist, Perkins, a professor as well? And why might it be significant that Perkins dislikes all mention of superstition and ghost stories—the very things that made M.R. James famous?

Q2: Sigmund Freud, in his essay “The Uncanny,” explains that “the old [beliefs] live on in us, on the look-out for confirmation…as soon as something happens in our lives that seems to confirm these old, discarded beliefs, we experience a sense of the uncanny.” How does this story suggest that we all carry around vestiges of the “old ways” within us?

Q4: What makes the ‘thing’ in the room so upsetting—and unnatural—to Parkins? Why, too, does the boy say “it warn’t a right thing—not to say not a right person”? Why didn’t James make this look like a devil, or a monster, or something typically ‘evil’?