“The Remarkable Rocket” is a short story from Oscar Wilde’s 1888 story collection The Happy Prince and Other Fairytales. As the title of the book states, this story can be considered a fairy tale. Its fairy-tale-like qualities include the fact that it takes place in an unnamed and generic European kingdom and the fact that its characters include a king, princes, and princesses—as well as anthropomorphized objects and animals that can speak and behave like humans. Like most fairy tales, it also has a moral lesson for readers to consider, specifically that people should avoid the kind of arrogance exhibited by the Rocket, King, and Frog lest they end up ignorant and alone.
At the same time that this story is a fairy tale, it is also a satire of fairy tales. This comes across in the way that Wilde exaggerates and plays with certain fairy tale tropes. For example, rather than centering the King, Prince, and Princess in the story and having the non-human characters selflessly support the human characters’ growth (as typically happens in fairy tales), Wilde quickly pivots away from the humans and onto a group of anthropomorphized fireworks who spend a fair amount of time bickering amongst each other about inconsequential matters. In this way, he indicates that he doesn’t take the conventions of the fairy-tale genre all that seriously.
