The Nightingale by Hans Christian Andersen The Nightingale is the story of an emperor who hears about a nightingale in his empire that he has never seen or heard and which everyone talks about how beautiful this bird is. He is intrigued by the discovery of this bird and so sends his chamberlain to search the corridors and find the famous nightingale. The chamberlain approached the scullery maid who had already heard about the nightingale. He leads him into the forest to find the bird and ask it to sing for the emperor. Once the emperor hears the nightingale, he orders a cage and keeps it in his empire, but the bird is not happy about being stuck inside, so he waits for the perfect moment to escape the empire leaving the mechanical bird in the cage. The emperor is angry that the bird has escaped and banishes it from his empire. The emperor falls ill; enough to die soon, and has death sitting on his chest. The nightingale flies back to the empire and sings for the emperor who soon finds himself healed and well. The emperor and the nightingale establish a plan so that the bird remains free to come and go as it pleases and sing whenever it wants, or not. The nightingale promises to sing about good and evil, sadness and joy, all things hidden from the emperor until he promises not to tell the people. A little bird tells him everything. And they lived happily ever after. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay While this story doesn't begin with "once upon a time" or anything like a typical folktale, the author alternatively creates a distant setting that happened long ago and lets you know it's an old history. Since folktales are known to be old stories that are told from narrator to narrator, this story reminded me of that. Like a folktale, the story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning of the story focuses on the creation of an imaginary landscape, a world of magic and beauty. I noticed that this story creates an obstacle right from the beginning where the chamberlain is looking for the nightingale at the request of the emperor. Search as it were high and low for this nightingale bird and with the help of the scullery maid; they find the bird to bring back to the empire. In this part of the story I noticed that the conflict fell into the repetition of three. The chamberlain heard the cow mooing and thought it was the bird, he heard the frogs croaking and also thought it was the bird, finally, he heard the real nightingale. Another similarity between the traditional folk tale and this story is that the story includes a helper figure. The nightingale has three: the chamberlain who helped find the nightingale for the emperor, the kitchen helper who took the chamberlain into the forest to find the bird, and the nightingale himself, as he sang for the emperor whatever happened, which brought him back to good health. In the middle of the story, I didn't notice the action quickly approaching or the main conflict like the traditional folktale would. Instead, and this is another example of how they differ, the nightingale brought much happiness to the emperor and those of the empire until one day a mechanical bird showed up and sang with the nightingale. The nightingale slipped out of the window without anyone noticing and this became another conflict within the story. The emperor was shocked, as were the courtiers who scolded the nightingale and said that it was the most ungrateful bird. It was banished from the empire and everyone was happy with the song of the mechanical bird because they always knew what it would sing and they knew all the words to the song. Soon the plot changes and the emperor falls ill. Not.