Essay Week 4: Stories within Stories

                Last week, for our Storybook Project assignment, we explored various storytelling options that we might later use for our final Storybook. It was a great way to learn about telling stories from different perspectives using various techniques. This week, I read stories in the Arabian Nights unit. These stories used a particular form of storytelling. The stories were layered in such a way that some of the stories were stories told within a story, and others were stories told within those stories. The style was very interesting in the way that it brought all of the stories together.

                The unit begins with a story of an evil sultan who takes a bride every night, then kills them the next morning. Scheherazade, the daughter of the sultan’s vizir, then offers herself as a bride and uses the following stories to postpone her death. Each night she will end the story at an interesting point, influencing the sultan to let her live another day so that he can hear the rest of the story the following night. It is a genius plan, but we don’t get to see how it ends for Scheherazade. I suppose that the entire story was too long to fit into this whole unit.

Scheherazade. Web Source: Un-Textbook

                Something very interesting about the stories she tells each night is that they often relate to the predicament she is in. In the Merchant and the Genius, the Merchant finds himself at the hands of an angry Genie. However, the Genie does not kill the Merchant because of the stories told by three old men. We see the same thing happen to a fisherman who is threatened by a genie. In this story, the genie tells a story, then is tricked by the fisherman, who then tells a story of his own. The stories are all so complex, so this provides Scheherazade many nights to postpone her death.