Reading Notes - Twenty Two Goblins (Reading B)

Wow, what a twist! 

So the whole time I'm reading Twenty Two Goblins I'm thinking that the goblin is just this jerk who keeps making this weary king keep going back to pick up a dead body. But turns out that the monk, who sent him on this whole cockamamie journey is evil and wants to kill the king and become king of the fairies. It wasn't until the second to last chapter, "Father and Son, Daughter and Mother," that we even learn that Patience the Monk is actually scheming and conniving against the king. And at first it seemed kind of abrupt for the goblin to reveal what was really going on. But I wasn't even suspicious that the goblin might have an ulterior motive. I just believed him, and so did the king. Because it turns out that the goblin's true nature wasn't an abrupt revelation at all.

I made the rookie mistake of scrolling straight past the intro to each chapter and going straight to the riddle. But in the introduction to each paragraph--which I initially believed I could skip because they were all basically the same--there is a slow and subtle shift in the goblin character. He goes from being an "obvious threat" to having respect for the king's persistence. He grows fond of the king, or maybe he always was and shows it more in the later chapters. The king seems to grow weirdly attached to the goblin as well, because he believes him immediately, so at some point, the king stopped seeing the goblin as a threat. Or maybe he never did. 

The point is that both the characters and the reader get lulled into a sense of security by the repetitive nature of the story, even though ever riddle is different and some of the introductions show subtle shifts in the main characters. I loved that it was a big reveal, and it honestly did catch me off guard. 

"Twenty Two Goblins"
 by Perham W Nahl via Wikimedia