Essay: Arabian Nights- Recurring Motifs

"One Thousand and One Nights", from uploader Chordboard on Wikipedia 

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   Probably the most obvious motif that comes with Scheherazade's tales is the way she keeps building each story within the previous narrative layer. The specific way she does this though is fairly interesting: every character who winds up telling a story within the story that they're in, tells their own story in order to save their own life or the life of someone they know. In the grand scheme of Arabian Nights, this is a blatant metaphor for how Scheherazade is using her stories to delay the death and suffering of not just herself, but of the families and girls that Sultan Schahriar destroys in his madness.
   Another motif that recurs in the series is that the person who is threatening to murder the storyteller is propelled by one of a few drives: either insatiable anger or unreasonable superstition. Ironically, Sultan Schahriar exhibits both in his current state of mind, because he hates women for both the deception that his wife used against him and he's completely convinced that all women are deceptively evil. Scheherazade is indeed deceiving the Sultan. However, she doesn't do this to harm him, but instead to heal him and stop the suffering he visits upon the families of his kingdom.
   The storytellers in each story seem to have more varied motivations than that villains however. They range from fishermen, a physician, and even a half-stone half-man. Like I previously stated, all of these storytellers are telling narratives to either save their own life, or the lives of those they pity or care about. I understand that the reason Scheherazade gives these people various backgrounds yet the same purpose is to convey the different backgrounds of the people in Sultan Schahriar's kingdom. They all hope to postpone the murder of themselves or those they care about by the antagonist, and their only hope is to try and get the antagonist to empathize with them. Knowing how the story of a Thousand and One Nights ends, I know that Scheherazade's strategy to evoke Schahriar's empathy works, saving herself and the kingdom.

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