What Are Some Examples of Morals Taught Through Fables?
Morals taught in “Aesop’s Fables” include “Slow but steady wins the race,” from the fable “The Hare and the Tortoise,” and “Birds of a feather flock together,” from “The Farmer and the Stork.” Aesop’s fables state the moral lesson at the end of the story, though in other fables the moral may be merely implied.
Fable is a literary genre in which a moral lesson is taught by a concise, illustrative story. “Aesop’s Fables” is the most famous collection of fables. It is attributed to Aesop, an ancient Greek slave who lived between 620 and 560 BCE.
In the Aesop’s fable, “The Hare and the Tortoise,” the hare mocks the tortoise for being slow. When the tortoise challenges the hare to a race, he agrees, thinking he will surely win. However, the hare takes a nap halfway through the race and loses, despite his faster speed. At the end of the story the moral is explicitly stated: “Slow and steady wins the race.” Thus, Aesop first shows the moral through the story, then he tells what the lesson is.
Not all fables explicitly state the moral at the end. For instance, George Orwell’s novel “Animal Farm” is a fable that teaches a moral lesson about the foibles of the Russian Revolution and Stalinism, though this lesson is never directly stated.
