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

UNCLE REMUS
(JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS)
,.
“Tricksters in Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings”
by Robert C. Evans,
Auburn University Montgomery
Brer Rabbit, the main animal character in the “Uncle Remus” tales
by Joel Chandler Harris, is so obviously a trickster that there almost
seems no point in discussing the matter—partly because the matter
has already been so much discussed. Hardly a year has gone by, especially
recently, in which scholars have failed to examine or at least
mention Harris’s rabbit as a trickster in some connection or another.
Harris himself, in the immensely popular fi rst book of the “Uncle
Remus” series (Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings), never explicitly
calls Brer Rabbit a trickster, nor does he even use the verb or the
noun “trick” when presenting him in that collection. Nevertheless, the
rabbit’s trickery is so blatant and so frequent that scholars of Harris
almost always call Brer Rabbit a trickster, while scholars of tricksters
almost inevitably mention Brer Rabbit (see, for example, the index to
Bickley and Keenan).
A more interesting question has been the subject of some recent
critical discussion: To what extent (if at all) is it reasonable to interpret
Uncle Remus himself, as well as Joel Chandler Harris, as tricksters?
In other words, to what extent are both Remus and his creator more
complex characters—more clever, more deceptive, more ironic and
sly and manipulative—than they might initially seem? Th ere was a
time when most interpreters confi dently assumed that Remus was
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