Reading Notes: Week 2 Anthology

The Trickster story in the Anthology gave me a lot of potential ideas for the upcoming storytelling assignment. So here are my notes for "The Tiger, The Brahman, and the Jackal":

Writing Style

• There's lots of dialogue
• Told in third person omniscient
• There wasn't an exposition of characters, it kind of started in medias res with the tiger already stuck in the cage

Characters

• The Brahman pleads with several inanimate objects, aside from animals
• Each object and animal had their little backstory explaining why their lives were also miserable, so he the Brahman shouldn't feel bad about his fate.

Plot

• There were essentially 2 twists in the story: tiger tricks the Brahman to open the cage and the jackal tricks the tiger to get back in the cage
• Trickster stories may allow you to play with reader's expectations

Illustration from story by John Batten

Bibliography:

"The Tiger, The Brahman, and the Jackal" from Indian Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs with illustrations by John D. Batten (1912) - Story source