Week 6 Reading Diary: Brer Rabbit Tales Continued

This week I read the Brer Rabbit Unit from Joel Chandler Harris's series of books of Brer Rabbit tales. In this second section of reading, I think I found my favorite little story of them all. I liked the Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Bear story because it was a double trick! First, Brer Fox had to catch Brer Rabbit, then Brer Rabbit had to find a way out of it, and this time he did it by tricking Brer Bear! I also laughed every time the story mentioned goobers. This was probably mainly due to the Spongebob song "Goofy Goober," which is an American classic for sure.

I would describe Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox as frenemies. They pretend to be nice to each other half of the time, but their ultimate motivation for basically everything in life is to destroy each other by foiling the other one's plans! Everyone else in their social circle is basically just a pawn in their disputes and tricks. This is a lot like the leaders of two disputing cliques in a high school movie. The two clique leaders are usually the main ones feuding, but the other people in the movie get their own subplots usually. This could be a really fun way to retell the Brer Rabbit stories with humans instead of animals, which I think would be a really fun change up. Especially if I could make the main theme one of the proverbs from these stories!  

I really think these stories have lessons/morals that could be great in a sort of modern retelling. You just have to rethink the whole fox eating the rabbit thing!

 

illustration by A. B. Frost