Reading Notes: The Cunning Crane and the Crab

Title: The Cunning Crane and the Crab
Author: W.H.D Rouse

So the story I found most enjoyable was the Cunning Crane and the Crab. The gist of it is:

Setting the scene: There is a small pool drying up in some kind of drought, and all the fish are miserable.
Enter the antagonist: A crane was tired of working for his meals, and tricked the fish into climbing into his beak for a ride to a better pond. He ends up eating all the fish.
Enter the protagonist: The crab is he last creature in the pond, and the crane tries to trick him as well.
Climax/ Resolution: This backfires on the crane, and the crab kills him after making him go to the better pond.

This story started off fairly good with a detailed description of what was happening in the little pond. The setting for this story isn't just where did this happen? It was also what were conditions like that made the decisions possible? I like this because you can do more with it. It doesn't take much in the way of extra details, but it adds more immersion to the story, and you can get a better feel for why the characters, the fish, make the decisions that they do.

What I actually found most interesting is that the crab wasn't even mentioned until the end of the story. The crane seems to be the main character of this story, and he was undone by a seemingly less important character. Not much was done to put detail into the crab before and after his interactions with the crane. I feel this might have been done to show some level of unimportance of the crab. To sort of emphasize this, the crab is not the focus of the illustration included in this story. He remains at the bottom, away from the central components.

Crane and the Crab