Blooms Literary Themes - THE TRICKSTER.pdf - ymerleksi - home

216
A Th ousand and One Nights
all that hath befallen me and all that shall befal me! . . . As often as
I say, I have escaped from one calamity, I fall into a worse. Would
I had been drowned at sea or perished in the mountains!” (427).
Th is episode is diff erent for the strength of his self-reproaches (“I
kept blaming my own folly and greed of gain”) but also for what
happens next. He manages to survive until the next pair is let down
into the cavern and kills a surviving woman with a leg bone. He
subsists in this way for a long time, “killing all the live folk they let
down into the cavern and taking their provisions of meat and drink”
(428). Once again, Sindbad demonstrates that, where everyone else
is content to die, he will fi ght, all tooth and nail and cleverness,
to survive. As with other tricksters in folklore who transgress the
boundary between life and death, the episode recounts a trip to the
Underworld where Sindbad is left for dead, inhabits for some time
this land of death, ultimately rejects the fate designed for others, and
survives to tell the tale.
Eventually, Sindbad fi nds a way out by following an animal’s
tracks to a crevice in the rock and, true to cunning form, he manages
to bring out of the cavern all the treasures that were buried with the
bodies since “time immemorial” (426). He makes camp on a beach,
returning to the cavern every day to murder and avail himself of his
victims’ provisions, waiting to be rescued. Sindbad saves no one from
the cavern. A merchant ship appears in the distance.
In the midst of the greatest diffi culties, Sindbad always invokes
Allah, and perhaps this is the real tale that Sindbad tells when he
fi nally leaves the cavern. Although in previous episodes he attributes
his salvation to Allah, the emphasis seems rather to be on his own
cleverness. While in the cavern, he never ceases “to ban the Foul
Fiend and to bless the Almighty Friend” (427). He implores Allah to
help him in his despair. During his Seventh and fi nal voyage, while
clinging to the planks of yet another destroyed ship, Sindbad insists
on his need to repent: “O Sindbad, O Seaman, thou repentest not
and yet thou art ever suff ering hardships and travails; yet wilt thou
not renounce sea-travel . . .” (454). Here Sindbad acknowledges that
he deserves all that has befallen him and repents the cause of all his
woe: “Never will I again name travel with tongue nor in thought”
(455). Th e episode ends with his fi nding himself again in a city where
he is taken under the wings of a shaykh who takes him home, helps