Your last two assignments involved giving an historical account of  your own and someone else’s experience.  In each instance, you have told a story based on real events.  With this third assignment, I am asking you to do three things:

1)Analyze and interpret a folktale, fable, or parable that uses character and plot in order to criticize, condemn, or correct common social attitudes, traditions, or behaviors.  You may choose any of the stories assigned for reading, or you may use the URL sites I’ll be giving you to access a folktale, fable, or parable on the Internet.

2) You will then  write a true story that describes the same social attitude, tradition, or behavior that is described in your chosen folktale, fable, or parable.

3) Finally, you will either write a brief (one page at the most) explanation of how your own true story mirrors your chosen folktale, fable, or parable, or you will include that explanation into the body of the story itself, just as Victor Frankl did in the story below.
 

Folktales, Fables, and Parables often function as Allegories, which are stories whose characters (and sometimes their events and setting, as well) represent specific abstract ideas or qualities.  Allegory is often intended to be subversive in nature, as it uses deceptive language to criticize those who have power or authority over others.
 

Folktale: A short narrative which comes from "the people" as a whole. There is no single author.  Rather, these tales have been told out loud over and over again, usually by older people who handed them down to younger generations.  Consequently, every version of the tale is a little different from the version that came before.  Folktales often seem to be about critical stages of life: birth, initiation, courtship, marriage, death, and work, and  amusement. Some people argue that helping children work through their conflicts is one of the folktale's most important functions.  Another important function of the folktale might be to criticize common social attitudes, traditions, or behaviors.

Fable:  A short, simple story with a moral lesson, is a type of allegory.  The main characters in a fable are most frequently animals, though people and objects (like trees, rocks, rivers, etc.) are also sometimes used as central figures. The Aesopian fables emphasize the social interactions of human beings, and the morals they draw tend to embody advice on the best way to deal with the competitive realities of life. With some irony, fables view the world in terms of its power structures. Foxes and wolves, which the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge
called "Everyman's metaphor" for cunning and cruelty, appear often as characters in fables chiefly because, in the human world, such predatory cunning and cruelty are able to get around restraints of justice and authority.

Parable:  Another kind of allegory, is a story illustrating a moral, in which every detail parallels the moral situation that has made the story necessary. Parables do not analyze social systems so much as they remind the listener of his beliefs. The audience hearing the parable is assumed to share a communal truth but perhaps to have set it aside or forgotten it.
 

Readings for Analysis, Discussion, & Illustration:

Reading #1:     The link below will lead you to an example of how one person used a true story and a parable, together, to explain why many German concentration camp prisoners did not attempt to manipulate circumstance in order to improve their chances of survival.
Instead, many prisoners felt they felt they were safer if they adopted a fatalistic attitude (i.e. they chose to let Fate determine whether they would live or die).

Psychiatrist Victor E. Frankl, in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, uses a folktale to describe and explain his own fatalistic attitude while he was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.  Click on the link below and read what he has written:

Reading #2:     Nobel-prize winning author, Elie Wiesel, who is another concentration camp survivor also uses allegorical parable to describe and explain why he, as a writer, has made the choices he has made ever since World War II.  The following link willl lead you to the bit of a story that he uses just prior to beginning his novel, The Testament (New York: Summit Books, 1981):

Reading #3:     If Frankl and Wiesel use allegorical parable to describe and explain why they make the choices they do, others use allegory to describe the unjust behavior of others.  In his revised and updated edition A People’s History of the United States 1492-Present (New York:
HarperCollins Publishers, 1995. P134),  historian Howard Zinn includes the following story to illustrate how badly the Creek Indians had been hurt by President Andrew Jackson’s policy of removal:

Assignment:

Get into groups of two and gather around one computer.  Go to Webboard and . . . .