What a Reader Is Asked to Know
About Life
- What a Shepherd Boy, mountain, dark forest, village, and wolf is.
- That loneliness and excitement are feelings
- What it means to trick, deceive, and fool others
About Language
- How to read from left to right and top to bottom, while understanding the language that is being use
- Why Shepherd Boy and Wolf are capitalized
About Literature
- What fables are and the purpose they serve
- The message that fables give at the end are what the readers’ should learn after reading the fable
What a Reader Is Asked to Do
- Understand the flow of events starting from an introduction to a concluding statement
- Realize that the story is meant to bring out a sense of fear so that people who read it learn what not to do
- Understand the context of the story and how the characters’ interactions with each other make sense
Who is the Implied Reader?
The implied reader of the fable are children. The story speaks out against the idea of lying, which is a bad action taken by both children and adults. However, I feel that the author would feel more empowered to persuade a younger audience against lying through the use of fables such as “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”. Despite the fact that the moral of the story is very obvious to both children and adults, the author makes the assumption that adults already know that lying is bad by using a wise man to give the concluding statement regarding what went wrong in the story.