Extra Reading Diary Week 5

Sinbad

The Unit on Sinbad is told in first person which I found interesting because I was able to get a sense of the mindset of Sinbad. I found it interesting to read the motivation that made Sinbad kick off his adventure was that he was going broke and was thinking about the future. Finding out that he was sea sick was funny because I have always thought of Sinbad as being of the Sea. This is because as a child I saw the movies about Sinbad and they always portrayed him as a Sailor, so seeing that he was sea sick for the first part of his voyage was something new.

The whale being mistaken as an island seemed a little bit of a stretch to me, though it did make me think of Moby Dick. Another thing that was interesting was that Sinbad was just a crewman and not the captain. I had always thought of him as being the Captain of the Ship. He gets shipwrecked and then taken in by the King. The king gives him a ship and he gets a crew and then he encounters his old captain that thought he was dead. This part of the story seemed to scream Dharma to me. The captain gives Sinbad his stuff back and Sinbad rewards him for being honest. This for some reason reminded me of the Ramayana.

The king and everyone else treats Sinbad much like people treat Rama. The king gives him a bride. Though Sinbad does not really exhibit the same personality of Rama. Though he takes the bride he is planning on returning home at the first chance he gets.

Sinbad is horrified understandably at the custom of Burying living spouses with the dead spouses. He tries to find a way out of this when his wife dies but if buried with her. He is given water and bread to eat. When a woman is lowered into the hole with her dead husband, Sinbad kills her and steals her supplies. This really kinda casts Sinbad in a poor light. He is not really coming across as heroic. He escapes by following an animal that leads him through a passage to the sea. He then returns and steals the Jewels from the dead. He seems like a really poor character. I am not sure what this is supposed to teach other than the fact that he continually cheats death.

Bibilography
Arabian Night's Entertainment by Yang

Picture Attribution
René Bull [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons