"The Roles of Fables in Human Life" by Edward Clayton
In the article "The Roles of Fables in Human Life" by Edward Clayton, he explains what is the purpose of fables.Clayton believes that fables have much more meaning than what they are seem as. He says that humans are much like animals and fables are mainly portrayed as animals because of the Athenians, They believed that there is a strong connection between how animal behaves and human behavior. Clayton believes that we shouldn't be comparing ourselves to animals because, it feels like he is trying to say humans are more superior then animals. He states in this article “Why should we choose to act like animals when we can choose not to and when we can create an environment in which acting like an animal is unnecessary (197).” I believe that humans and animals are connected in some sorts of ways but humans is the ones who dominate because we have a mind and we think, we question about the world unlike the animals, they don't think, or at least they don't think they way humans do. I think the Aesop's reminds humans how we are not pointless that we are all here for a reason , humans established democracy, justice, and moral code, we use them to "plan for the future, and change their environment and behavior" (198). Although we are like animals, we are not any ordinary animal, we are remarkable people that have our own voice, own opinion and we can make choices in our lives. In fables people can relate to the animal characters portrayed because the fables gave the animals human like personalities, which makes people feel like they can relate to the animals but then if the characters were written as humans people might not be willing to admit that they can relate because they think whatever happen to the characters are just another story, like movies we watch. For example, in a movie someone has cancer, we would think that's just a movie, it's not real so it won't happen to you but the truth is we all have a chance of getting cancer, but we just don't want to believe that this can actually happen to ourselves. Also, some people who are reading fables might just look at it as a story with no meaning.
I agree with your last sentence on how some people reads fables as a story with no meaning. Before fables were read by adults where they were getting advice about how to deal with life. Now kids are reading fables for lessons on what is good or bad. But when kids are reading they read the fable as story they do not try to figure out the meaning of it.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your last thought, it is true that some people might see these fables as just stories and nothing more. You made me think about how each individual sees a situation differently and how there will always be agreements and disagreements. Also I agree and disagree the fact that we only look at these animals in the fables because we gave them humanly characteristics. I feel like each animal has a known characteristic, for example like the lion; known to be the king of the jungle and has much power and strength verses a mouse, know to be slick but yet quiet. So i think the animals aren't just seen to have human characteristics but that they already had them and we are just similar to these animals.
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