Animal Trickster Stories 137Th e animal trickster tale is the most famous type of
folk tale. In the African American tradition, the trickster
may be embodied by a rabbit, a fox, a hare, a bear, a wolf,
a coyote, a whale, a hyena, and a monkey. “Th e False Mes-
sage, Take My Place” and “Some are Going, and Some are
Coming” constitute illustrations of the misleading mes-
sage and the blurred vision, respectively. Th e former tale
includes the Rabbit and the Wolf, the fi rst of whom was
trapped by a man and is hanging in a sack at the end of
a tree branch, waiting to be slain. Th e Rabbit off ers the Wolf
the chance to go to heaven, and the Wolf credulously ac-
cepts without understanding that the Rabbit intends for
them to exchange places. In “Some Are Going, and Some
Are Coming,” the Rabbit traps the Fox by passing on to
the Fox the blurring vision by which the Rabbit himself
was just trapped. Aft er jumping into a bucket in order to
reach a piece of cheese at the bottom of a well, he invites
the Fox to jump into the other bucket to share the food
with him, and thanks to the Fox’s weight and naiveté, the
Rabbit is able to come back to the surface; the cheese was
actually a refl ection of the moon. It is interesting to notice
that in these two tales, the Rabbit was not clever enough
to avoid being trapped himself but was cunning enough to
bounce back by himself and at another’s expense.
To sum up, the general function of a trickster tale is
similar to that of a fable, during which a character may suf-
fer temporarily, but ultimately acquires a new awareness.
However, the purpose of the trickster’s maneuver is not to
produce a scapegoat. Th e deceiving and upsetting phases
that the “temporary victim” undergoes as a result of the
trickster’s antics are necessary steps for the former’s spiritual
improvement toward knowledge and awareness. Th e out-
come of the stories usually involves the victim discovering
that he has been duped. Th e trickster tale consists of the
depiction of an initiation, a rite of passage, undergone by
the trickster’s victim, a binary pattern that reminds us of the
meta-diegetic level of the writer–reader relationship.
See also: Africanisms; Anansi the Spider; Black Folk Cul-
ture; Brer RabbitValerie Caruana-LoiselBibliography
Courlander, Harold. A Treasury of Afro-American Folklore. 1976.
Reprint, New York: Marlowe, 1996.
Cumberdance, Daryl. 400 Years of African American Folktale from
My People. New York: Norton, 2002.Th e very notion of the trickster comes from ancestral be-
liefs, manifested within African American folklore. Th e
trickster is an archetypal representation gift ed with magi-
cal powers and personifi ed by a tripartite entity, partly di-
vine, partly human, and partly animal. Plus, this protean
fi gure embodies a transitional status and has the power to
cross boundaries; for instance, a trickster such as Esu (in
the Fon mythology) is talented with the knowledge of all
languages and therefore stands as the ubiquitous fi gure of
mediation.
Th e theme of trickster stories puts forward a double
topic. First, it brings out the notions of African mythology
and of oral transmission of a folkloric heritage. Trickster
stories convey riddles and morals but have also provided
the tools for survival. Tales are intended to soothe the mind
of an uprooted people through the transmission of these
pieces of folkloric legacy. Historically, animal trickster sto-
ries symbolize the projection of the dominating/dominant
relationship that existed between masters and slaves—
hence, both the allegorical meaning of the possibility of ex-
tirpating oneself out of traps thanks to clever tricks and the
recurring theme of revenge in folktales. What is more, the
trickster tale partakes of a contrapuntal answer addressed
to the dominating culture.
Second, it hints at the rhetorical device that consists
of concealing meaning and misleading the trickster’s tar-
get, a concept named the “signifying monkey” by Henry
Louis Gates Jr. Th is transposition of an underlying mean-
ing through symbolic protagonists echoes the linguistic
process of codifi cation that characterizes African American
Vernacular English.
Traditionally, animal trickster tales feature at least
two protagonists, the prankster and his stooge. Th e for-
mer stands in a position ahead of the latter insofar as he
retains knowledge that he aims to deliver to the gullible,
but in an indirect way and not without making fun of him
fi rst. Th e trickster deploys craft y actions in order to achieve
his trick or to overcome the hindrance. Th us, a range of
winding paths unfold before him, such as the exploitation
of superstitious creeds, the use of fl attery, the invention of
pretexts, the blurring of his target’s perspective and vision,
the transformation of his own appearance, and the power
to become invisible. Despite the multiplicity of subterfuges
available to him, the trickster never veers from his original
purpose, and his strategy is somehow equivalent to the de-
vice of irony.