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The Masque of the Red Death

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In Aesop’s fable, “The Wolf and the Lamb,” the moral of the story asks the reader to examine the desire for an object—and how we justify our behavior if we cannot obtain that object. This moral is graphically presented through the repeated use of key words to describe the fox’s repeated failure to get what he wants. The fox’s first attempt is foiled as he “just missed” the grapes (35). He attempts “again and again”, running and jumping repeatedly, but has “no greater success” (35). He then becomes disgusted and walks away. These successive descriptions of his failure build to his disdainful comment that the grapes are probably sour (35). The repeated demonstration of fox’s failures and his self-rationalization of why is he walking away—not that he has failed but because he has decided that the grapes are sour and he does not want them anyway—cleverly portrays the moral of the fable: if you can’t get it, blame something else, not yourself. It therefore asks the readers to

Aesop’s Fables
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The Wolf and the Lamb
Once upon a time a Wolf was lapping at a spring on a hillside, when, looking up, what should he see but a Lamb just beginning to drink a little lower down. ‘There’s my supper,’ thought he, ‘if only I can find some excuse to seize it.’ Then he called out to the Lamb, ‘How dare you muddle the water from which I am drinking?’ ‘Nay, master, nay,’ said Lambikin; ‘if the water be muddy up there, I cannot be the cause of it, for it runs down from you to me.’ ‘Well, then,’ said the Wolf, ‘why did you call me bad names this time last year?’ ‘That cannot be,’ said the Lamb; ‘I am only six months old.’ ‘I don’t care,’ snarled the Wolf; ‘if it was not you it was your father;’ and with that he rushed upon the poor little Lamb and .WARRA WARRA WARRA WARRA WARRA .ate her all up. But before she died she gasped out .’Any excuse will serve a tyrant.’

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