The rat and the elephant
The rat and the elephant (French: Le Rat et L'Eléphant ) is the 15th fable from the eighth book of the collection of fables by the French poet Jean de La Fontaine .
A rat watched as a dressed up elephant trudges heavily down the street. High on its back, stacked on three stories, the elephant carried the wife and household of a sultan (including dog, cat, monkey, parrot and servant) to a distant pilgrimage and was marveled at by the people on the street. The rat then mocked the audience, which is impressed by such a ponderous crowd, and the docility with which the people backed away. She sneered whether it was decisive for the high or low level who would take up the largest space for himself? Every child fears the elephant, but those who are much smaller are no less than an elephant. In the further course, however, the rat experiences a brutal reprimand for its personal considerations, because the sultan's cat catches and kills the rat.
The fable ends with the moral that a rat is not an elephant. The plot does not show a moral order, but the cruel order of things in the real world. On the contrary, the rat is punished well beyond its offense, while the cat is still free to move on. Another irony is that the rat is so unimportant in the general course of events that the elephant continues its stately journey without being aware of either the life or the sudden death of its talkative critic.
analysis
The fable begins with the French fabulist pondering the vanity of the Spaniards and the French. As a man who knows that self-knowledge should start with oneself, the poet prefers the mad vanity of the Spaniards over the foolish pride of the French. In this story, the place where the protagonists meet is the place where the effects of vanity become dangerous. The key to the visual or narrative dialectic is the different sizes of the characters: One of the smallest rats despises one of the largest elephants. At first sight, the Rat seems to be right - people are generally too quick to mistake sheer size, wealth, or public standing for merit . From the rat's point of view, the argument that a small rat can be as good as a giant elephant seems perfectly reasonable. However, instead of wasting her time preaching about the gullibility of the people and the vanities of the mighty, she would have been wise to regain her size and look for a place to hide from the Sultan's cat. The story implies that individuals should learn to recognize themselves and see themselves through the eyes of the rest of the world rather than relying on their own self-flattering assessments. The unpleasant message in this fable is that some of us are rats while others are born elephants. The story of the rat and the elephant shows that hierarchies are a fact of life and appear to be an irrefutable truth.
See also
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Andrew Calder: The Fables of La Fontaine: Wisdom Brought Down to Earth . Librairie Droz, 2001, ISBN 978-2-600-00464-0 , pp. 126–127 ( google.de [accessed on August 2, 2020]).