The Thousand and One Nights: Abridged, Restructured, but Ever Lasting
Jeff Stephens
Dr. Swenson
English 2111
11-22-11
The Thousand and One Nights: Abridged, Restructured, but Ever Lasting You may have read the story many times; you may have even watched the live-action movie or animated film, but only a few have been able to discern the unique traits inherent in The Thousand and One Nights. Willis G. Regier, a writer for World Literature Today, wrote that “the Nights has been read, admired, studied, illustrated, adapted for the stage, and Disneyfied” (321). The traits that I would like you to remember are how I used interruption to structure the story and how I implemented love within the stories to help me win back King Shahrayar’s trust and pacify his fear of psychosexual replacement. While telling the king stories of grandeur and impossibility, I snuck in little snippets of truth and morality. Richard Burton, once said, “Without the nights, no Arabian nights,” by which he meant that in dividing the story into separate evenings it was given structure and without that structure The Arabian Nights would be no more than a collection of short stories (qtd. in Van Leeuwen 183). Burton could not have been any more correct. However, I would also like to point out that without the nights themselves, my own story would have ended long before the king changed his mind in the case of my death sentence. Structure in a story like The Arabian Nights is like the branches of a tree that bears fruit; not every branch will produce the fruit, but all the branches will have leaves to help collect the energy to make the fruit. In the same way that a tree bears its fruit, my mini-stories bear the fruit of change within King Shahrayar’s heart. Through my stories, I was able to help the king reclaim some of the hope, understanding, and even love that he had once lost because of his unfaithful wife. I also showed him that women could yet be good and kind, faithful and true, and be intelligent without the wickedness which so many other storytellers
Dr. Swenson
English 2111
11-22-11
The Thousand and One Nights: Abridged, Restructured, but Ever Lasting You may have read the story many times; you may have even watched the live-action movie or animated film, but only a few have been able to discern the unique traits inherent in The Thousand and One Nights. Willis G. Regier, a writer for World Literature Today, wrote that “the Nights has been read, admired, studied, illustrated, adapted for the stage, and Disneyfied” (321). The traits that I would like you to remember are how I used interruption to structure the story and how I implemented love within the stories to help me win back King Shahrayar’s trust and pacify his fear of psychosexual replacement. While telling the king stories of grandeur and impossibility, I snuck in little snippets of truth and morality. Richard Burton, once said, “Without the nights, no Arabian nights,” by which he meant that in dividing the story into separate evenings it was given structure and without that structure The Arabian Nights would be no more than a collection of short stories (qtd. in Van Leeuwen 183). Burton could not have been any more correct. However, I would also like to point out that without the nights themselves, my own story would have ended long before the king changed his mind in the case of my death sentence. Structure in a story like The Arabian Nights is like the branches of a tree that bears fruit; not every branch will produce the fruit, but all the branches will have leaves to help collect the energy to make the fruit. In the same way that a tree bears its fruit, my mini-stories bear the fruit of change within King Shahrayar’s heart. Through my stories, I was able to help the king reclaim some of the hope, understanding, and even love that he had once lost because of his unfaithful wife. I also showed him that women could yet be good and kind, faithful and true, and be intelligent without the wickedness which so many other storytellers