Reading Notes: Laos: To Aid a Beast, Part B

This story is part of the Laos unit. Story source: Laos Folk-Loreby Katherine Neville Fleeson, with photographs by W.A. Briggs (1899).
Source

I found this story particularly interesting because it initially resembled a story I had read earlier in the semester. In that story, an animal was trapped and begged to be free. Once it was freed, it attempted to kill it's savior. In this story, however, there were several plot twists. The first was each of the animals the hunter freed ending up helping him. At the same time, the tiger he had freed seemed to have betrayed him. Then, the goldsmith was the one who turned against the hunter to make a profit. Overall, there was a lot of ambiguity within the characters. For example, the hunter had to blind the wife of the King to provide the King a reason to exchange the cure for his freedom. Aside from a very interesting plot, the characters seemed well defined. Although the title of the story is “To Aid Beast is Merit; To Aid Man is but Vanity”, it was actually the tiger that started the conflict of killing the King's son. If I were to retell the story, I would adjust who killed the King's son so the animals were only helpful rather than causing the conflict.

Tiger Cartoon by Wikipedia