Comparing The Shroud And Aesop's The Two Crabs

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s story “The Shroud” and Aesop’s story “The Two Crabs” are stories that differ from the typical “rite of passage” meaning. The causation, or inducement, of a rite of passage can be vast; a child’s journey into adulthood, an individual is accepted into a new community, or it can be perceived as the acceptance of a change in life. Rites of passages vary from culture to culture and in many times, they are presented as a ritual of sorts. Many cultures celebrate life events and are all mostly exclusive to the culture, like the Latin culture that celebrates with the Quinceañera, or the Jewish faith with the bar mitzvah. A rite of passage is commonly the process of a parent or authoritative figure assisting a younger person

Parentage is ironic because a parent’s job is to protect and develop the child’s mind, but in this case the child is teaching the parent, specifically the mother. The mother is used as a symbol in many ways as a teacher yet in this story she seems to be criticizing her child rather than teaching the child. A mother and child are strolling the beach casually as of any other day when she notices the child’s walking behavior. The mother tells the child, “you are walking very ungracefully. You should accustom yourself to walking straight forward without twisting from side to side” (383). To which her child responds with, “do but set the example yourself, and I will follow you” (383). This shows that the mother is unaware that she walks ungracefully, and that her child has set her upon changing in a way that she has wanted all along. Her attempt at correcting her child lead to her finding something in herself that she had no idea of in the first place. This is the irony in “The Two Crabs” because this is the teaching moment revealed between the two

In this short story a mother’s son dies at the age of seven, a number of perfection biblically, and he was so amazing that “no one could look at him without liking him” (87). The mother loved the child so much that she wept nonstop when he died from the illness. The ghost of the child began visiting her at night to play with her. This is possibly because he died too soon and he needed closure for himself, as well as his mother. Eventually the boy stopped coming in the night and this is when the mother needs further help from the boy to accept his death. His next visit he is no longer wanting to play and weep with his mother, he wishes for her crying to cease. The boy tells his mother, “Oh, mother, do stop crying, or I shall never fall asleep in my coffin, for my shroud will not dry because of all thy tears which fall upon it” (88). The boy needs his mother to accept his death and try to move on, so he can rest peacefully knowing that his mother is no longer weeping due to his death. The mother then begins to move on and she puts her troubles before God and he begins to heal the mother of her sorrow. Because of her child’s death, the mother found her way to God and she found a way to cope with the death of her child. The irony in “The Shroud” is how the death of a mother’s son brought the mother close to God and that the son came to her wanting her to be at