Death and the unfortunate
Death and the Unfortunate (French: La Mort et le Malheureux ) is the 15th fable from the first book of the Fables Choisies collection , Mises En Vers by Jean de La Fontaine . With cold irony, the fable tells of an unhappy person who, with comical devotion, calls death to be the savior. When death appears to fetch him, however, the unfortunate sends him away again with a shock and a shudder.
The moral of this fable is: No matter how desperate you are, fear of death triumphs. The main thing is to live.
La Fontaine offers a philosophical examination of the subject that takes on an impersonal tone throughout the poem; unlike in the fable Death and the Woodcutter , one does not learn anything more about the suffering of the protagonist . "La Mort et le Malheureux" shows only a slight resemblance to its source after Aesop : La Fontaine quotes the Epicurean main character in the end instead of providing a moral as with Aesop - as a note from La Fontaine explains why he placed both fables next to one another .
Individual evidence
- ↑ La Fontaine, Jean de: Fables Choisies, Mises En Vers. In: Landesbibliothek Oldenburg . 1755, accessed December 14, 2019 (French).
- ^ Karl Vossler : La Fontaine and his fable work . Carl Winter, Heidelberg 1919, p. 121 .
- ↑ Anne Lynn Birberick: Reading Undercover: Audience and Authority in Jean de La Fontaine . Bucknell University Press, 1999, ISBN 978-0-8387-5388-0 , pp. 19–21 ( google.de [accessed December 15, 2019]).