Week 5 Essay: Arabian Nights

For the assignment this week, I read Arabian Nights' Entertainment. One of the main elements in this set of stories was the layering of stories within stories. Another, was how the elements actually tied together somehow or were used in order to get an idea across, not just as elements of entertainment. Though I complained about how the overlapping of stories made my head hurt, I really did enjoy it. It was hard to go back to the original story one the second layer of story telling was over, but each time a new story was started I felt like I was being transported to another world.

Within each story I noticed that the main character or plot of the new story resembled that of the character who was telling the story. Some of the stories were very similar to the situation that the Sultana was in. The character would have to tell a story in order to save their life. I also feel like there was a genie/genius in every single story. The genie could be good or bad but there was always one there either in the actual story, or that the story was being told to.

One of the things that I noticed in the stories that I really like and might actually use in my writings sometimes was the usage of stories, not just as entertainment, but also as a means of communicating different ideas. In the story The Story of the Parrot/The Story of the Ogress, the king and his vizir are exchanging stories in order to explain how trusting someone you barely know could either be beneficial (as the king believed), or a very dangerous (as the vizir believed). They use the stories to convey a situation or circumstance in order to persuade the other person.

(Forty Thieves Attacking)