Week 4 Essay
This week for class I read Arabian Nights from the
UN-Textbook. It was a rather interesting read. I had some other choices in mind
to read, but I didn’t because I was too unfamiliar with the topics. I chose to
read Arabian Nights because in the disruption it mentions Aladdin. Everyone has seen the Disney movie and I
thought that it would be interesting to read the real story about him.
I found of
that the story was about a girl named Scheherazade who had to tell a story to
save her life. Schahriar
was the sultan and one day his wife betrayed him. He then killed his wife and
mistrusted all women. Schahriar started to marry random women, and on the next
morning he would have them killed. One day, Scheherazade volunteered herself to
the sultan despite knowing what would become of her fate. She came up with
clever plan to save her life. At night whenever she was sleeping with the
sultan she asked if she could tell him the best story ever told. He was
intrigued by this and decided to listen. Scheherazade did not finish the story
before night so she asked the sultan if she could live another night to finish
the story and he agreed. This occurred for many nights and the townspeople were
surprised that she was not dead yet.
The reason for her story to take up
so much time was that she had a recurring motif in her story. The motif was
telling a story within a story. It didn’t matter what kind of story she was
telling, good or bad. Scheherazade somehow found a way to tie one story into
another and another again. Her stories would reach 3 or 4 levels deep. Her
strategy to stay alive by telling stories was clever and scary at the same
time. Everyday she was scared that the sultan wouldn’t want to hear another
story and have her killed. Besides the actually man story the other stories are
pretty entertaining themselves. They are short and sweet. The last one was the
longest one and it was about Aladdin and the Genie. The story was completely
different from the movie and longer too so I decided to write about that for my
Storytelling post. In my story my recurring motif was the dreams that Bri was
having.
Sketch of Aladdin
Draw by shelziru. More drawing can he found here:
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