Fictional Text Analysis
The Merchant and his Iron
The article that I analyzed for the Fictional Text Analysis is a story called “The Merchant and his Iron”. It is a tale of how important trust is among friends. In this story, the characters weren’t given real names, but were called “Merchant”, “Friend” or “Son of Friend”. From the clues provided, it’s very likely to take place somewhere where sparrows live as well as rats. It is also very likely that the environment has iron ore, because the Merchant had 200 tons of iron (which he then trusted to his friend to take care of). Apart from that, there are no clues on where the story is set. Language-wise, there were little hints: The characters communicated in formal dialog, showing respect to each other. The everyday lifestyle was poorly described, it just states that family and sons were important and that the father would easily let the son out of the house during daytime. The story started out with the Merchant going on a journey, the reason was unclear. This could hint that it isn’t rare for people to go on journeys for whatever reasons. Money was important in this situation, as well as in many other tales. The friend of the merchant was probably not too wealthy, seeing that he sold the merchant’s iron to pay his debts. Just like many other places, this could show that there was a wide difference between the wealth of people – from people who own 200 tons of iron to people who would steal to cover their debts. The tale taught a lesson of trust-value, of how one should be careful of who to trust with possession.
-Asuka Heltmann
May 20th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
Asuka, a reasonably good analysis. A little more discussion of the values may have helped.