Using a mixture of elements from fairy tale and fable, Thurber draws a seemingly humorous moral from his story. His message is, however, quite serious : we must not let one community aggress another purely in its own interest.

We have the whole text in front of us, and so we can see how it functions. "Once upon a time" is the classical opening of a fairy tale and by using the terms "sanctuary", "happily" and "refuge", Thurber indicates that here is a kind of paradise for the inhabitants, who are birds.

In the third sentence, the coming conflict is announced by the words "protested", "arbitrary" and "unnatural" with reference to the fence protecting the birds. These words are used by a community of foxes, and so we are now in a familiar fable context, where animals speak and reason. Foxes a

The advantage of Thurber's "fable", which in my opinion is beautifully efficient and economical, is that we can plainly see the gap between words and actions. Sadly enough, this gap remains unnoticed most of the time, and it often is too late when the public opinion reacts... Will brother always turn on brother ?

Thanks to the narration, we can see that "liberation" means in reality "killed", and since we have been told that the leader of the foxes places himself above God (very shocking !), we can't help seeing them as total villains.

re of course predators, and the word "pack", whih is usually only used to describe animals who hunt in groups (wolves, hounds) characterizes them as belligerent. Moreover, foxes are traditionally portrayed as intelligent and this makes them all the more dangerous in this context.

The final result is already suggested by the use of the verb "to civilize" which is shown by Thurber to be a synonym for "to eat" as far as the foxes are concerned... When the foxes start to

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 685
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)