The First Old Man's Tale Analysis

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After witnessing his wife’s and concubines’ betrayal, King Shahryar executes all of them and decides to make all the women in the kingdom suffer for their mistakes. He weds a virgin every night, consummates their marriage, and then executes them come the light of morning. Then the next day he begins the process again until Scheherazade offers herself to the King to stop his madness. In a Thousand and One Nights, the many stories Scheherazade tells her husband, King Shahryar, have a similar theme. The tales that are recounted through the mere entertaining act of storytelling include the themes of justice, good versus evil, and honor thus providing a parallel to life itself. The elements of magic and morality are also incorporated in order to teach man certain ethical life lessons.
In “The First Old Man’s Tale”, the old man describes to the demon that the deer traveling with him is his cousin and wife of thirty years. He explains that while away on business, his wife learned the ways of magic to turn his mistress into a cow and his son into a bull. Upon his return, his wife told him that his mistress had died and his son had runaway. His wife successfully persuaded him to sacrifice his mistress, the cow, but when he tries to sacrifice the bull, the butcher’s daughter reveals what the wife had done and he realized that his wife …show more content…
The wife of the old man is vindictive because she lashed out at the mistress and step-son. The sinners are trapped in an imaginative correspondence, created by Dante, between their souls on earth and punishment their souls will receive in hell. The central cause of the sinners’ demise lies in their inability to use their God-given minds to determine whether their actions are acceptable or not. The wrong doers deny themselves their human civility because they constantly indulge in their

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