Fooling the King
The first story is that of Scheherazade and her sister, Dunyazaidiad. Every night, Scheherazade is able to prolong her life by telling the King stories and leaving them unfinished. In a way, she tricks the King into keeping her alive. Dunyazaidiad compares her sister with a girl from a story who was kidnapped by a man and then hidden in a chest looked with seven keys and throws it into the ocean. By doing this, the man hopes that he will be only one able to have sexual intercourse with the woman. After the man drags the chest out of the ocean and rapes the girl, he usually falls asleep on her lap and the girl uses this opportunity to escape and go and find other sexual partners, taking their rings as proof. This is seen as an act of rebellion against the man who stole her and Dunyazaidiad compares her sister’s action of storytelling with the actions of the woman in the story because Scheherazade also tricks the King every night and while she remains a captive, she wins because she remains alive.
Magic
In the first part of the story, Scheherazade compares the power magic has in books with the power words have in real life. Scheherazade began to look for ways to stop the King from killing virgins and after analyzing the problem from various perspectives, she reached the conclusion that only magic can stop the King. But Scheherazade quickly realizes that magic does not exist as it is presented in books and stories, but it is rather in the words used to invoke the supernatural being able to perform magic. Because of this, Scheherazade draws a parallel between magic and words and compares them, putting them on the same place and considering both as being extremely powerful.
Words
Words have an important purpose in the novel, especially in the first part, in which words represent the channel through which Scheherazade and the genie communicate through as they both need to write a magic phrase in order to talk with the other person. In this sense, words are here a metaphor for a type of communication that transcendences the boundaries of reality and time. The magic words let the author from the real world communicate with a character existing in the fictional world and vice versa. In this sense, words have a magical property.
Metaphor for safety
Perseus mentions the wooden chest in which his mother and him have been put in by his grandfather and thrown into the sea. The chest saved their life and provided them with shelter until they were found by a fisherman. Perseus kept the chest and gathered in it various things that make him feel better when times are tough. Because of this, it is safe to assume that the chest is used here as a metaphor for safety.
Metaphor for feeling hopeless
The idea that predominates Perseus’s story is that he is unable to become sexually aroused. This can be seen as a metaphor for feeling hopeless and inadequate to do a certain task. This can be linked with the state he had when he was alive namely with the fact that he was a mortal man put in the situation to fight against mythological creatures. His inability to become sexually aroused makes him conscious of the fact that he is in fact human; when the nymph compares him with the other Gods she slept with, he falls behind them.
