Reading Notes: Twenty-Two Goblins Part B

As this story goes on and comes to an end, we find that the goblin was not so evil after all and that it was the monk that was an evil doer. Since this is not the ending I was expecting, it did give me a few ideas on how to change it.

One change that I thought of for this story would be that the king is too proud to give a wrong answer. He knows all of the answers to all of the riddles, but he refuses to answer incorrectly even though he has to to get the goblin to leave the body. It could now be a story about learning to give up your pride in order to do the right thing, and the monk could instead have been teaching the king a valuable lesson rather than using him.

Another way to retell this story would be to have it be some kind of game show. This story is told in such a way that it would be easy to make into a game show of some kind, involving the king, the goblin, and the monk. It would be a comedic approach to this story.

One thing that I feel like the story didn't really go that much into was the corpse. Like I said before about turning the story into one about pride, it could be that the corpse is a prisoner of some kind that must be rescued and the only way to free him is through answering all of the riddles correctly. Perhaps the king needs help with this task and it turns into an adventure type of story.

Goblin and King

Twenty-Two Goblins  Arthur Ryder's translation of the Sanskrit Vetālapañcaviṃśati