preview

Arabian Nights Argumentative Essay

Decent Essays

The Arabian Nights is renowned for its multiple uses of enframed narratives. The layering of stories adds new meaning to the various tales of The Arabian Nights by bringing up new questions. In every story one reads, one finds themselves asking why Shahrazad would tell such a story, what kind of message is this tale giving Shahriar, and why bother telling another story within an already enframed story. However, The Arabian Nights is not alone in its use of the enframed story. Works inspired by The Arabian Nights use their own enframing devices in order to alter how one perceives and understands the stories these offshoots have taken from The Arabian Nights. The adaptations this paper will look at include Disney’s Aladdin film, Pasolini’s Arabian …show more content…

The common ransom story does a wonderful job of lateral comparisons by bringing stories with similar motifs, plots, and themes together. “The Merchant and The Jinni” produces this effect. The story starts with a merchant who accidentally kills a Jinni by throwing a date seed (The Arabian Nights 1: 10-19). The Jinni’s father appears declaring that he will kill the merchant. Through a series of events, three groups of travelers show up, and each traveler decides to exchange a third of the merchant’s punishment for a story. The travelers’ introduction starts drawing comparisons between these travelers right away because they are all traveling with animals. As each traveler tells their story, one cannot help drawing more comparisons as each story is about a failed romance which is dealt with in some other way than violence, normally turning the guilty party into an animal (The Arabian Nights 1: 10-19). The repetition of a nonviolent resolution to romantic conflict ends up making a lateral comparison about the nature of conflict resolution. In particular, the stories take on additional meaning as a tool to help Shahriar understand there are a variety of ways to deal with romantic issues that do not involve murdering virgins (The Arabian Nights 1: 3-10). By using enframed stories as a means of comparison, The Arabian Nights adds extra depth and meaning to stories in light of the outer narrative and the surrounding stories in order to produce a far more complex understanding of any one theme or

Get Access