Fairy Tales

Tales in Which Bad Characters Lie

The “Boy Who Cried Wolf” is a famous Aesop's fable about a shepherd boy who amused himself while watching the village sheep by falsely yelling, “Wolf! Wolf!” to make the villagers run up the hill to protect the flock. Both times that he yelled this, he was lying—there was no wolf. By the time a wolf actually came and the sheep needed protecting, the villagers did not come because they no longer believed the shepherd boy when he called. One of the villagers later explained to the boy his wrongdoings: “We'll help you look for the lost sheep in the morning. Nobody believes a liar … even when he is telling the truth.”

In this story, the moral is that bad things happen when people lie. Readers see the direct consequence to the boy's credibility when he is discovered to be lying. The moral is stated at the end of the fable as, “Even when liars tell the truth, they are never believed. The liar will lie once, twice, and then perish when he tells the truth.” In other words, it does not take many lies to make a liar, and when someone is considered a liar, this person suffers the consequences. In this case, the shepherd boy is not initially portrayed as a “bad character,” just a bored, troublemaking boy. However, he pays the price for his lies—both in terms of losing the sheep and ruining his reputation.

The message that if characters lie, they are bad, is also common in other fairy tales. In “Little Red Riding Hood,” a girl encounters a wolf in the woods on the way to her grandmother's house. She tells him where she is going, and he suggests that she pick some flowers to bring to her grandmother. While she does this, the wolf goes to the grandmother's house, calls to the grandmother as if he was the little girl, and then eats her. The wolf then disguises himself as the grandmother, and when Little Red Riding Hood arrives at the house, he eats her too. Luckily, a passing woodsman saves the girl and her grandmother by cutting them out of the wolf.

[Page 356]In this story, the wolf lies on several occasions: He deceives the girl into thinking that he was just making a nice suggestion when he tells her that she should bring flowers, which gives him enough time to eat the grandmother; he pretends to be the girl when he knocks on the grandmother's door; and he disguises himself as the grandmother to lure the little girl in and eat her. One may argue that the wolf uses selective self-presentation in this story. He is concerned with the way the girl initially perceives him because he has ulterior motives and wants to lull her into a false sense of security. For this reason, he attempts to manage her first impression of him as a harmless, almost kind character—as seen when he suggests she stop to pick up some flowers for her grandmother. This is all part of the wolf's devious plan, but he succeeds in misleading the girl. As punishment for the wolf's deceit and crimes, the woodsman helps the girl and her grandmother fill the wolf's body with stones, so that when he wakes up, he can't move and falls down dead.

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