Reply to comment

 I also read from the Harvard classics online. I read the introduction, "The Story of the Merchant and the Jinni," "The Story of the Fisherman," and "The Story of the Humpback."

It interests me how this collection of stories plays upon the idea of narrative by the simple fact that within every story there is a portal into yet another story, so that the tales operate in infinite succession. Not only do the stories go on infinitely and somewhat circularly, but we as readers in our interpretations create new stories from these stories, and so the process never ends. This endless generation of narrative is both absurd and, as in the framework of The Thousand and One Nights, the primary mechanism by which we simultaneously face and attempt to ward off our mortality.