Literary Monster

The passage depicted in the introduction is meant to highlight the evils that Shahrayar fell to when he felt betrayed by women. After Shahrayar has taken his sword and killed all of his slave women and declared he would marry for one night only and kill the woman the next morning to spare himself from the wickedness of women, the passage tells of him tasking his vizier to bring him a princes daughter, an army officers daughter, marchants daughters and commoners daughters on and on until they were all dead.(Norton Anth.) This deterioration of the status of the women that Shahrayar slept with is a parallel to the deterioration of Shahrayar's own moral status. As he continues to kill more and more women he is feeding the monster inside him and letting his humanity fall farther and farther until, like the women, there is almost none left. This parallel continues as Shahrayar doesn't kill Shahrazad for over two years, allowing women to be born again and grow up similar to how he recovered his humanity and it grew enough to spare Sharazad.

Throughout the ordeal Shahrayar never faced his own evil. Every time he ordered the vizier to bring him a woman, so the vizier had to choose which woman would die that day. And once the night was over the sultan turned to the vizier and ordered him to put the woman to death.(Norton Anth.) Using the vizier, Shahrayar was able to hide himself from the evil and monstrous acts he was commiting by not watching them occur.

The passage repeats through as the vizier finds each woman and presents them to Shahrayar. He “slept with her” “and the next morning ordered the vizier to put her to death”(Norton Anth.). For Shahrayar, this repetition creates a routine that he can simply stop thinking about. When he is able to fall into a routine he is able to not think about the harm that is being done to the women he sleeps with. Not only does a routine allow him to care less, but his ability to fall into a routine and ignore the evil he is commiting shows how monstrous he is. For the readers, the repetition emphasizes how out of touch with humanity Shahrayar is and how drastic his killing was, that each and every night over and over he would sleep with a woman then order her killed. The repetition allows the reader to picture the routine and how long it would go on for creating a deeper understanding of how much Shahrayar affected his people.

The passage also highlights how the vizier was unable to disobey Shahrayar. As a position of absolute power, kings had no checks and balances to keep them from becoming evil. Because of this, kings have the ability to turn evil and commit monstrous acts on a far larger scale than anyone else, with the fate of all their subjects in their hands.

Finally, the end of the passage depicts the mothers of the women mourning their daughters, cursing upon their own king because of what he'd done.(Norton Anth.) The imagery allows the reader to see the impact Shahrayar had on his people, how their lives were negatively impacted. This creates an important note, that the women who were murdered were not the only ones affected by Shahrayar's monstrous acts but every single subject because they were all mother and fathers or daughters and sons of the women Shahrayar killed, proving he is truly evil for abandoning every single person under him.