1001 Nights essay
1001 nights
Chaucer used the frame of that collection of stories, to make all of the stories inside that frame more complicated, more ambiguous and more interesting. Our interest in this collection of story is in the frame on the way stories get told. But there are two things for all purposes in this course. The first one is the question what kind of a story does this frame require? The frame itself is in some ways more limiting than that in Chaucer’s since it only has one narrator and a very limited audience. Technically an audience of one that Shahryar allows Dinnerzad is also always there so that there really is an audience of two. Chaucer had 30 tellers and 30 listeners, so the possibilities of the interaction among those 3 people are much greater. Scheherazad needs to stretch her stories over as many nights as she possibly can and the way she does this is by telling nested tales, so that possibly she can have 3 or 4 stories going at one time.
What that means if the interaction between teller and listeners is more limited in this collection and it is in Chaucer, the possibilities for narrative complexity are much greater. nested stories: The idea is, never to allow a story to end at the end of a night which would give the king a chance to put her death into morning since he would have heard the end of the story.
On the very first night Scheherazad starts a story about a merchant who one day sits down to eat his lunch. When he is finished he throws away the stones from his dates.
Notice we have already at first night begun the nesting process, the first sheikh story is actually a story within the story and it has to be finished before we can get back to frame story.
Scheherazad’s second important technique in addition to keeping several stories going at once is never to finish story by the time the king needs to sleep for a few hours before getting up and doing his kingly duties for the day. In this story she does that too. The story that the first
Chaucer used the frame of that collection of stories, to make all of the stories inside that frame more complicated, more ambiguous and more interesting. Our interest in this collection of story is in the frame on the way stories get told. But there are two things for all purposes in this course. The first one is the question what kind of a story does this frame require? The frame itself is in some ways more limiting than that in Chaucer’s since it only has one narrator and a very limited audience. Technically an audience of one that Shahryar allows Dinnerzad is also always there so that there really is an audience of two. Chaucer had 30 tellers and 30 listeners, so the possibilities of the interaction among those 3 people are much greater. Scheherazad needs to stretch her stories over as many nights as she possibly can and the way she does this is by telling nested tales, so that possibly she can have 3 or 4 stories going at one time.
What that means if the interaction between teller and listeners is more limited in this collection and it is in Chaucer, the possibilities for narrative complexity are much greater. nested stories: The idea is, never to allow a story to end at the end of a night which would give the king a chance to put her death into morning since he would have heard the end of the story.
On the very first night Scheherazad starts a story about a merchant who one day sits down to eat his lunch. When he is finished he throws away the stones from his dates.
Notice we have already at first night begun the nesting process, the first sheikh story is actually a story within the story and it has to be finished before we can get back to frame story.
Scheherazad’s second important technique in addition to keeping several stories going at once is never to finish story by the time the king needs to sleep for a few hours before getting up and doing his kingly duties for the day. In this story she does that too. The story that the first