Reading Notes: Week 6 Extra Credit Reading

Title: The Story of the Fisherman
Author: Andrew Lang
Link: Story link.

Plot:

• There lives a Fisherman who only casts his nets four times a day, never more. His family is very poor -- maybe because he only casts his nets four times a day.
• The Fisherman casts four times and catches...
• 1. The dead body of a donkey.
• 2. Trash.
• 3. Shells and rocks.
• 4. A small, sealed yellow pot.
• He decides he can at least sell the pot for some grain, and pries it open with his knife.
• A terrible Genie appears, and tells the Fisherman to choose how he wishes to die.
• The Fisherman stalls for a bit, then tells the Genie that he can't believe a creature so big could fit inside the pot. He cleverly asks for a demonstration so that he can believe it.
• The Genie goes back into the pot to show the Fisherman and the Fisherman seals him inside once more.

The Fisherman encounters the terrible Genie. Illustration by H. J. Ford.

Setting:

• The sultan's palace, where Scheherazade tells the sultan her stories each night.
• The sea, ostensibly somewhere coastal on the Arabian Peninsula.

Characters:

• Sultan Schahriar: Convinced that all women are wicked and deceitful. Because of this, he marries a new wife each evening and strangles her in the morning.
• Really, really unpopular with the locals because of this.
• Scheherazade: Clever, courageous, beautiful and very well-educated. Daughter of the grand-vizir. She decides to stop the sultan's murder spree by stalling her execution with stories.
• The Genie: A terrible, arrogant spirit who insists on killing the Fisherman once he is freed.
• He is foolish and is duped.
• The Fisherman: A poor, unlucky man who is nevertheless clever enough to forestall his own demise and best the Genie.

Writing Style:

• More frame tales! Plus, this one is inherently full of cliffhangers. The short, choppy, somewhat-related nature of the stories (e.g. Scheherazade telling the story of the Fisherman telling the story of the King and the Physician, etc.) leads to a pretty complex, varied narrative that still manages to keep an element of coherence. Everything is technically related because it's being told by different characters in the story.
• This strikes me as a fabulous way to lend a sense of connected-ness to an otherwise disjointed tale.