The Unicorn in The Garden - Format and Style

Format and Style

At 530 words, including the tagline "moral", "The Unicorn in the Garden" qualifies as a short short story, but is generally consistent with the format of a much older literary form, the fable. Fables typically employ anthropomorphic animals as characters, a convention Thurber ignores here, concentrating instead on the reactions of the human husband and wife.

Wordplay, a major element in much of Thurber's work (e.g. the battle over the letter O in The Wonderful O, and the recurring sound effect "ta-pocketa-pocketa" in "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty") is seen here in the multiple uses of the words "booby" and "hatch". Parallel construction and repetition of words for comedic effect can be found in the sentence, "hey had a hard time subduing her, but they finally subdued her." This is unusual in that such repetition is generally discouraged, especially in journalism and formal writing. Although fiction does not necessarily follow the same rules of style, Thurber, a former reporter for the Columbus Dispatch and (briefly) an editor for The New Yorker under Harold Ross, would certainly have been aware of such stylistic guidelines.