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Fable

Fable

Definition:

Brief fictitious narratives (prose or verse) which provide an explicit moral understood through one or two telling event(s) whose message is usually conveyed through personified animal characters representing human faults. This traditional form of story, related to proverbs and folklore, takes abstract ideas of good or bad, and/or wise or foolish behavior, and attempts to make them concrete and striking enough to be understood and remembered.

Purposes:

• To entertain
• To convey a moral lesson
• To make a cautionary point

Characteristics:

• Typically written as a short story
• Classic (archaic) form and language use
• Three main collections: Aesop’s Fables (Greek), The Panchatantra (Indian), and fables of La Fontaine (French)

Themes:

• Instructive messages about human faults
• Explicit moral based upon cultural point of view

Characters:

• Assigning human characteristics to animals, plants or objects (anthroporphism)
• Presented stereotypically (e.g., wise owl/innocent sheep)
• Exhibit one dominant trait of human nature
• Characters are in conflict
• Chief actor/main character is an animal or inanimate object (e.g., fox and grapes, crow and water in pitcher)
• Usually 1-3 characters
• Tricksters alternate between cleverness and stupidity or kindness and cruelty
• Have impersonal names (e.g., Fox, Owl, Frog, Boy )
• Flat development (lacking depth)

Setting:

• Time and setting are vague
• Setting exists only as a backdrop (unimportant)

Plot:

• Usually one incident
• Characters are in conflict
• Trickery is the turning point
• Problem resolution is accomplished through one or two events leading to a life lesson (universal truth) at the tale’s end
• Moral explicitly conveyed through few words
• Complex, abstract concepts (e.g., perseverance, ingenuity)

Author’s craft:

• Point of view
• Patterned responses (repeated for effect)
• Assigning human characteristics to animals, plants or objects (anthropomorphism)
• Personification (a figure of speech in which animals, ideas, or things are represented as having human qualities)
• Dialogue
• Abstract truths conveyed concisely (in few words)
• Instructive (providing direction or useful information) voice
• Evidence of human insight

Grade Level Instructional Scope for COMPREHENDING the Genre and Text of Fables:

Grade Level Instructional Scope for COMPOSING the Genre and Text of Fables:

Booklists:

• Grade 3

Access to the Documents:

Complete K-8 Genre Project
From the Michigan Department of Education

Complete K-8 Genre Booklist
From Kent Intermediate School District