What a great question. Kudos to your professor, or
whichever student came up with it.
I guess the answer
depends in part on how much of the story Thurber made up, and how much of it really
happened -- which we simply do not know. Does exaggeration imply a lack of
truthfulness? I've basically always assumed that Thurber said this was non-fiction, and
so it is. The basic gist of the story COULD have happened. There may have been a noise
downstairs which woke everyone. The mother might have thought it was a burglar while
the boys thought it was a ghost. The police might have been called by a neighbor, and
they might have found no evidence of an intruder. They could have heard the grandfather
upstairs and gone up, only to have the grandfather freak out and shoot one of them.
Granted, they probably would not have just left at that point, but who
knows?
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