Reading Notes: Week 2 Anthology

Indian Fairy Tales: The Tiger, The Brahman, and the Jackal by Joseph Jacobs with illustrations by John D. Batten (1912) was the story that stood out the most to me from the Myth-Folklore Anthology. This story began as most other folklore stories with a general setting with a proposed problem. In this case, the issue at hand was if the tiger should eat the Brahman. This story went on in the normal rambling sense of stories of this nature. I was expecting this story to go along the guidelines of trying to teach the reader some important bit of wisdom through example, so I initially thought the tiger was going to eat the Brahman. Where this story diverged was when Brahman encountered the jackal.

(Illustration by John Batten)

When the Brahman asked the tree and road, he did not have favorable answers to keep the tiger from eating him. When the Brahman met with the jackal, the jackal came across as a very confused character that did not seem at all to know what was going on at the time. This is why I believed the Brahman's fate was sealed. At this point, I thought the story would end with the Brahman being eaten by the tiger to teach the reader to follow your instincts and leave dangerous problems, like a tiger, where they cannot hurt others. This was where I was wrong. I had underestimated the seemingly dull jackal. This twist was quite pleasant because by the jackal playing dumb from the first telling of the Brahman's story to the last, he cleverly knew how to manipulate the tiger and save the Brahman.

This twist in the plot is a technique that I would like to incorporate in my story. I thought using the underdog in the story was a refreshing way to turn the story around in a way that I did not expect. Creating this sort of suspense about the Brahman's impending doom with no clear way out kept me intrigued. In addition, having the resolution at the very end helped drive the conclusion home.

Bibliography

The Tiger, The Brahman, and The Jackal, Indian Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs with illustrations by John D. Batten (1912)