One Thousand And One Nights Theme

1633 Words4 Pages

In One Thousand and One Nights(OTAON), the themes of the main plot focus on the power of storytelling and the use of entertainment to captivate and persuade an audience. There are also many other main themes in this story along with stories within the story that are discussed by readers and scholars to this day. However, not much attention is given to the themes and ideas stemming from the prologue of this story. Unlike many books, this prologue is actually vital to understanding the cause behind the direction of the main plot. Without this background information, the reader tends to focus more on the stories within the story and possibly disregard the greater meaning of what is going on between the storyteller and her audience. More specifically, …show more content…

Culture at the time of OTAON over glorified men and undervalued women. However, this is a false statement by modern standards where men and women are, in most parts of the world, considered equal. Equality means equal in all facets, good and evil. Therefore, if woman are innately evil as supposed by the kings in OTAON, then the nature of men are innately evil as well. Based on the evidence provided by the literature in OTAON about both men and women, men are just as evil, if not more, than the women are. Defining something as evil floats back and forth between the lines of being a subjective or an objective matter, but for the sake of this argument, if you tallied the total of wrongs committed by both sexes in this story, the moral offenses of the men far outweigh the offenses of the women. While the women of this story did commit a universally frowned upon act in adultery, the men were not respectable in their emotions surrounding the events, their responses were not sensitive towards others, and they constantly saw themselves as righteous, blameless, and untouchable beings even though we know they were far from

Open Document