The Unicorn in the Garden by James Thurber

The Unicorn in the Garden

James Thurber (1894-1961) is an American author. His short story “The Unicorn in the Garden” presents the story of a couple who lives two separate lives in the same house. This story is a fable and it has some fairy-tale features. The first and the last sentence are typical sentences of fairy tales. It is a fable, because the story has a moral at the end. 

The story opens with a man sitting at home eating breakfast and his wife sleeping in the upstairs. The husband sees a unicorn in the family garden eating flowers and tells his wife about it. He wants to wake up his wife, but she is angry about disturbing her.  Without getting up to look out the window, she tells him that it cannot be there in the garden because it is a mythical beast. He goes back into the garden, returns again to the bedroom, by telling that it has a golden horn in the middle of its forehead. His wife, still not getting up, warns him that he is a booby and she is going to have to put you in the mental institution.

 After the man returns to the garden, the wife calls the police and a psychiatrist with a hope that he will be arrested. She immediately sees how her husband's behaviour can be used to get rid of him. When they arrive, she tells them what her husband told, assuming that they will take him to the mental institution. The police and the psychiatrist ask her husband whether he saw a unicorn in the garden. He says no and the unicorn is a mythical beast. Thus they take the wife away instead, and the husband lived happily ever after.

 Until the last two paragraphs the readers have no indication that the husband too feels the same way. The writer does not give any indication whether the husband has planned this outcome. He leaves with a question of whether there was ever a unicorn in the garden at all. But the conclusion of the story that the husband lived happily ever after, indicated it was pre planned by the husband.

The moral of the story is "Don´t count your boobies until they are hatched!” The man in the story is very clever and the woman is an unfriendly person with bad intentions against the man. He could see how the woman will react to the story about the unicorn and got rid of her. The moral fits the woman because she counts the booby (the man) before it has emerged. Without understanding his intention she herself got into his trap.