Study Guide to

"The Donkey"
 
(Anonymous, from The Thousand and One Nights)
 

(1)  Is this a story structured around a conventional plot?  Can you identify parts of it that qualify as

What are we to make of the owner's response to his discovery of his old donkey in the market-place?

(2)  In what exactly does the donkey-owner's "simplicity" consist?  

Try to be definite about which actions the story expects us to understand as "simple-minded" and specific about what in particular about those actions makes them qualify as "simple-minded."

Then try to describe the traits of character that presumably lie behind these actions.

(3)  Suppose the story did not explicitly refer to the owner of the donkey as "the simpleton" but merely as "the man," or "the poor man."  Would the meaning of the succession of events be changed for you in any important ways?

Are there any actions on the part of the owner and his wife that might strike us as admirable?

Do they cease to be admirable because the tale continually calls the husband "the simpleton"?

(4)  What assumptions about God's attitudes do we detect in the couple's behavior do we detect in the donkey-owner's reactions to the surprises he encounters, and to those of his wife?  

Do these strike you as foolish?

Do they strike you as likely to be regarded as foolish by the seventeenth-century Muslim audience for which The Thousand and One Nights was originally designed?

(5)  What assumptions about God's attitudes do we detect in the behavior of the thief and his companion?

How would you assess these assumptions?

How do you figure the original audience would be expected to assess these assumptions, by the author of the compilation?

(6)  Could it be that the teller of this tale is a religious skeptic?

If we reject this possibility, what views about Allah are open to us to imagine the author as holding?

(7)  If this tale were to be taken as a fable, what would you propose as its moral?  

Can you come up with something that itself doesn't sound banal and "simple-minded"?

Suppose we resist the notion that this tale is to be taken as a fable.  Does it nevertheless have a theme worth contemplating?

 

  The text of this story may be found here, but is accessible only at the course website at K-State Online.


 

  Suggestions are welcome.  Please send your comments to lyman@ksu.edu .

   Contents copyright © 2003 by Lyman A. Baker.

Permission is granted for non-commercial educational use; all other rights reserved.
  This page last updated 21 August 2000.