Critiques of 8 Short stories The subject of The Zebra

The subject of The Zebra Storyteller is literature and its purpose as carried forth by the practitioner. The Zebra in the story is the storyteller, the artist, the creative force that shapes a story and imparts it to others. The Siamese cat is the embodiment of the story created by the Zebra. In this case, the story is real and actually exists, though the Zebra does not know this. The Siamese cat is the unknown and unexpected, and most zebras meet the unknown and are destroyed by the experience. The storyteller destroys the power of the unknown by seeing it first and then by imparting this knowledge through his or her stories to others. Fiction is a way to expand experience and to protect against the unknown. The author makes use of the fable form in telling this story in order to present an overarching moral such as would be expected in a fable. The animals are given anthropomorphic characteristics and so stand in for human beings, and what might seem fantastic in the real world becomes instead symbolic of the underlying themes given import by the author.

This story goes to the heart of what literature is and does, dealing as it does with the role of the artist in society. the Zebra Storyteller sees through the superstitions and fears of his fellow creatures and carries his knowledge through his stories to a wider audience, giving others the tools to fight superstition and falsehood on their own. He sees through the pretense of the Siamese cat while others have

issues unresolved and that hints at the moral struggle in the world without truly resolving it or issues it raises about human behavior. The journey taken by Young Goodman Brown in his discovery of the evil in the world itself is both symbolic and mysterious, for the purpose, while that purpose must be important to draw young Brown away on this night, is never explained. It is offered as an important duty, a duty that is almost religious for the young man, but at the same time there is in the way the young man approaches the task the aura of evil to be met and fought. The vision that the devil offers to Young Goodman Brown is a vision of the mixture of good and evil in the world. The journey undertaken by Young Goodman Brown into the woods is a symbolic journey into his own soul, and his progress reflects ideas about the Fall and its aftermath and thus about the human condition. In the beginning, Young Goodman Brown understands his place in society. At the end, he no longer is so assured and sees evil everywhere. His life has been changed forever by his exposure to evil and hypocrisy, perhaps in the real world, perhaps in a dream. The Lady with the Dog In the short story "The Lady with the Dog," Chekhov portrays the de