The Night the Bed Fell

In "The Night the Bed Fell," before going to bed, Aunt Sarah Shoaf piles all her valuables outside her bedroom door with a message for any potential burglars. When Aunt Gracie Shoaf goes to bed, she...

In "The Night the Bed Fell," the characters and their strange characteristics include Grandfather, who believes the Civil War is ongoing; Cousin Briggs Beall, paranoid about dying in his sleep; Aunt...

In "The Night the Bed Fell," the narrator states that the tale makes a better recitation than a piece of writing because so many wildly funny things happen that the story would be more entertaining...

In "The Night the Bed Fell," Rex, the family bulldog, assumes that cousin Briggs is the culprit who started all the commotion because he has never liked Briggs.

Briggs Beall's biggest fear is dying from sleep apnea. He worries that he will stop breathing in his sleep and suffocate. To prevent his death, Briggs sets an alarm clock to wake himself up...

"The Night the Bed Fell" is humorous due to the absurdity of the narrator's family's quirks and nightly rituals, which are more amusing than sympathetic. The grandfather's antics and the chaotic...

The confusion eventually gets sorted out in James Thurber's "The Night the Bed Fell" when James's father asks what is going on. This causes the pieces of the puzzle to fit together and all the...

The quality many of the characters in this zany tale share is self-absorption, a tendency to see life solely from their own point of view. In the story, the action takes off when the narrator's...

The story's narrator carefully outlines the placement of the rooms, stating: The layout of the rooms and the disposition of their occupants is important to an understanding of what later occurred....

Old Aunt Clarissa Beall was born on South High Street and married on South High Street—and because of that, she has had a nagging premonition that she will one day die on South High Street. For...

Two examples of similes in James Thurber's story "The Night the Bed Fell" are the narrator's comparison of his overturned cot to a canopy and his comparison of the night's humorous events to a giant...

Although the story recounts a series of chaotic and confusing incidents, the main tone is light-hearted. The narrator is relating these events retrospectively, and is able to look back on them with...

Briggs keeps a glass of liquid camphor on his nightstand to revive himself if his cousin forgets to rouse him. Briggs has an irrational fear that he will stop breathing in his sleep, suffocate, and...

Old Aunt Clarissa Beall can not only whistle like a man, with two fingers in her mouth, but also subscribes to the firm conviction that she is destined to die on South High Street. Her rationale...

In the short story "The Night the Bed Fell" by James Thurber, the family is used to the eccentric attitudes and behaviors of its members and accepts them as commonplace. We know this by the...

The story published as "The Night the Bed Fell" in the New Yorker is, in fact, the first chapter of author James Thurber's memoir, My Life and Hard Times, published that same year (1933). Dorothy...

One such line in the story is the following: The racket, however, instantly awakened my mother, in the next room, who came to the immediate conclusion that her worst dread was realized: the big...

In "The Night the Bed Fell," the author writes about the odd phobias of other family members for comedic effect. He is writing a comedy tale, and his intention is to get his readers to laugh, so he...

In James Thurber’s story, the narrator presents an apparent jumble of details that were part of the events on that remarkable night. He claims that the night was “the high-water mark” of his youth,...

On the zany night Thurber describes, the following people are in the house: James, the narrator; his mother; his father; James's brothers, Herman and Roy'; and Briggs Beall, who is the boys' first...