Fables and their importance

Upon first glance fables look like a short story with animals, usually, as the main characters. With a more purposeful eye one can look into each fable (or in this case at the end of each story) and find a moral that may pertain to his/or her life. To me personally one fable stood out more than the rest. The story titled "The boy and the filberts" struck of great importance to me. In this short story a boy digs his hand into some sort of jar filling up his hands completely. To his dismay his hand can not get out of the jar for it is to filled. A bystander tells the boy that with a hand that is halfway full you can get your hand and what you desire out. This taught me a powerful message: in life we might think we can handle a certain amount of challenges but to our surprise we can not. Life teaches us not to take too much upon ourselves even if we may believe we can cope. In  "Aesop, Aristotle, and Animals, The role of fable in human life" by Edward Clayton he explains that fables are not only stories for our amusement or even for a moral but they have an entirely different purpose. In this writing the author starts by telling us three fables. In each of these fables we can clearly see that the message or moral of the story is that evil will prevail and that at the end strength is stronger than the power of knowledge and good in general. The author explains that these fables are not just for us to read and admire but to understand its true message. With many descriptive details the author comes up with evidence pointing to the fact that fables are in a sense the crossroad between humans and animals. The stories portray animals with a humans characteristics but on the contrary the fable is there to show us the profound differences between the two. A fable, as Clayton describes it, is a way to show humankind what we can be and what we should become. In the stories the animals don't take, for example, voice into account but in our world the human voice is a rather powerful tool of restoration and/or destruction. From fables we can see that humans, although more "fair" and political than animals, do have room to become even greater. From both readings I have learnt the power of short to the point fable stories and I strongly agree with Edward Clayton in many ways.