One Thousand and One Nights (REACTION PAPER)

                One thousand and One Nights is a frame narrative. It is a compilation of different stories from different authors originating from different countries in Middle East Asia. It was a wise decision to make a single story which contains many different stories or should we say almost all stories in Middle East. In that way, whenever readers will read One Thousand and One Nights, they will also be able to read different stories from different authors and different countries. It is a total package of famous and must be known and must be read stories.

               I have only read the summary of the tale but not the entire book. And because of the summary that I have read, I have become more interested to read the whole tale. According to my research, it is a story that contains almost all genres. The tales include historical tales, love stories, tragedies, comedies, poems, burlesques, and erotica. The main frame story itself has an awesome concept. It is about a princess, specifically, a newly wedded bride of a prince, who is about to face execution by her husband. Her husband, the prince, has indulged himself from killing all that is going to be wedded to him after abating her wife’s maidenhead at night and slay her next morning to make sure of his honor. The prince’s first wife has committed infidelity against him. That is the reason why he keeps it in mind that all women are deceitful and should not be trusted, which is a sweeping generalization. Because of that thinking, the prince executes every woman he marries after using her.

               Scheherazade is one of the women that the prince has married. She is a smart woman. In order to save herself from execution, she tells the prince a tale. She does not end the tale before they sleep and because of the prince’s curiosity about the tale’s ending, her execution is postponed. And then the next night, she tells the ending of the tale then starts to tell another tale again without telling the ending. Another night, the same thing happens until it reaches 1,001 nights. Every tale she tells is always cliff hanging. The tales that she tells are originally coming from tales written by different authors. She tells not just short stories but also historical stories, poems, about science, and any other form of literature.


               Technically, the writer of the One Thousand and One Nights did not took so long in writing the story since the only original story that he had created a plot was the story of Scheherazade, the main character of the framing device. Basically, he only collected and compiled all the tales being told by Scheherazade from different authors in different countries in the Middle East. Because of the fact that One Thousand and One Nights is a compilation of different stories, it has become popular and important in Arabian literature. It has become the basis of people with regards to learning the literature of the Middle East. It has a lot of translations from different languages. The one who translated it in English was Antoine Galland. It also has different versions. But all versions contain the ending of Scheherazade being pardoned by her husband. Different version tells different reasons on how she was pardoned. 

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