One Thousand and One Night Essay

Updated: Oct 31st, 2018

The book One Thousand and One Night entails a collection of Arabic folklore put together under one book. Scheherazade, a young woman married to the King, tells these stories. Shahryar, the King has decided to marry a young beautiful woman every day after which he executes her.

He gets married to Scheherazade, his newest wife. However, her wit enables her to manage to postpone her execution for three years. Scheherazade keeps on telling her sadistic husband immensely fantastical stories, all which end with a guarantee of a better and more astonishing tale. In fact, some of the stories she tells are framing stories themselves with about triple and quadruple-nested framing devices. The stories make it abundantly easy for Scheherazade to postpone her execution.

A frame story as is a narrative technique, also known as frame tale, where the author tells stories within a story to explain the main story. The introductory part of the main narrative is presented for the reason of creating a stage for a more accentuated second tale or s series of shorter stories. The frame story often directs leaders from the previous story to the next and several succeeding ones (Heath 359).

Scheherazade tells some stories that are totally framing. With triple and quadruple nested framing devices. This literary technique works as a convenient conceit allowing the author to organize a number of shorter narratives devised by the author or picked from borrowed tales as part of building the longer story (Pinault 56).

Sometimes the main story within the main narrative can serve to sum up a crucial aspect of the framing story (Heath 359). The tale of Sinbad the Seaman and Sinbad the Landsman short stories are framing stories. These are nested stories.

The importance of literary techniques in literature is that they make the story remarkably explicit and more significant. They help in aiding the author to tell a story the way he/she intended to be (Husain 23). Many of the literary techniques are exceedingly common that readers can easily recognize them even though they may not know the correct names to use for reference. In the literature, one can use techniques without knowing their names (Heath 359).

The One Thousand and One Night story applies some tasteful poetic devices like leitwortstil. This technique is common. However, it is less referred to by its name. This technique is effective in that the author keep on repeating some words or some short phrases which convey the them or otherwise a crucial fact to the story. The author of this book applied this technique (Heath 360).

As Pinault observes, “Thematic patterning is another form of repetition where the author uses recurrent themes distributed in the story with moral motifs across various incidents and frames of the story” (56). Authors can skillfully construct the story. In One Thousand and One Nights, the author arranges the arguments and prominent thoughts to accentuate a unifying argument where incongruent events are common Husain.

The title entails a collection of stories from Middle East and South Asia apparently compiled in the Islamic Golden Age (Husain 23). Americans and Europeans refer The One thousand and one Night to as the Arabian Nights. The original concept is most likely to be from the famous Sassanid Persian archetype built on the Indian concepts (Pinault 56).

People have traced the tales back to the medieval era in the Persian, Indian and Egyptian folklore. The frame story is an old concept specifically in the Caliphate era almost certainly from the Pahlavi Persian literature (Husain 23). The literary technique of frame story is a common style in all the Nights editions especially Story of King Sharyar and his newest wife Scheherazade, narrating the story. The stories come from the original tales (Pinault 56).

In the framing tale, there are numerous reference as to that identify the genre of fable in the One Thousand and one nights as a moral and wisdom initiator. The cycle dated back to the 10th century. The many stories in the book are set in India. However, they do not have a known origin. People have subjected these stories to intensive scholarly analysis (Pinault 56). The title indicates endlessness of an exceptionally large number of stories.

Conclusively, based on the expositions made in the paper, it suffices to declare The Thousand and One Nights complex, informative, and religious sometimes though course at others. The nights included good and bad perceptions, sex and man-demon relationship. There are also instructions to help the king gain sanity and on how to control women.

The shape of the story is evident based on the philosophy of the expression model internalized by the type of literature. The book is a characteristic example of the power genre ideology. All the readings seem to point to a similar ending. In the end, in the story titled The Thousand and One Night, the King, Shahrayar, is free of his murderous behavior and tyranny. He eventually assumes another set of belief.

Works Cited

Heath, Peter. Expression error: Missing operand. Story-Telling Techniques in the Arabian Nights. International Journal of Middle East Studies 26.2(1994): 358–360.

Husain, Hardaway. The Thousand and One Nights. Trans. In The Norton Anthology: World Masterpieces. New York: Norton, 1995. Print.

Pinault, David. Storytelling techniques in the Arabian nights. Studies in Arabic literature Leiden: E.J Brill, 1992. Print.

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