Myths and narratives - Essay Example

It goes on to explain the intricacies of the friendship between the two people, where they are a rock to each other in good times, especially when they are both enjoying and experiencing success. However, there comes time when one of them, labeled as a law breaker, makes a mistake and breaks the law, which threatens the friendship as the law-abiding friend tries to stay away from helping his friend. When the time of trial comes for the law breaker, he is sentenced to death, and because of his love for his law-abiding friend he frames him so that they are sentenced together and die together.

This forms the basis of The Water Ghost narrative, which holds on to the ones it loves so that it is not left lonely in the next world. The story bears a common moral of not abandoning friends in time of needs as their love for those who abandon them could force them to take drastic measures against them leading to regrettable consequences. A critical look into the story shows that this is a rather uncommon occurrence as the law-breaking friend should leave the law-abiding one as he did nothing wrong.

Instead, he frames him for wrongs that he did leading altogether to a paradoxical teaching and moral of friendship. However, listeners of the myth should pay attention to the intricacies of friendship and how friendships can ruin lives, even though with well-intended actions. A good highlight of this one is the way that the law-breaker frames the law abiding friend into serving a similar sentence with him despite being innocent. On the other hand, the same story shows the demerits of not meeting the expectations of friends when they are in difficult situations in spite of their actions.

As such, the law abiding friend distances himself from the law breaker so that he is not implicated, but then again he gets framed to serve a similar sentence for breaking their beautiful friendship. The effectiveness of the events depicted in this story are applicable in many scenarios, especially when communicating a moral or social convention towards handling friendships in tight situations. As a result, the lesson acts as a guide to ward off bad friends and create awareness of different types of friendships as well as how much some friends are capable of ensuring the safety of their friends.

It, however, fails in one aspect, which is that of helping with decision making towards friendships as it only portrays the positive and negative meaning of friendship likely to lead to not having any friends. At the same time the story also justifies irrational behavior in friendships. Narratives serve a crucial part in the delivery of information, where they are easily remembered by the audience, thus, bringing the concept closer to the audience (Calavera, 2008). In addition, narratives and storytelling such as the one above allow to pass concepts in fun ways and the ones that can easily be related to by the audience because stories are great ways of passing time and delivering communication to the intended parties.

Communication of a lesson in the form of a story is apparently different based on the evidence from studies which shows a higher level of captivation and arousal of interest as compared to the boredom brought about by following the rigid rules. These rules form a framework for resistance, while storytelling breaks away from the monotonous instruction of what should be done and that which should not. So,