The fable "The Unicorn in the Garden" written in 1939 by James Thurber (1894 – 1961) is about a woman who thinks her husband is crazy, but later on she is the one who is thought to be mad. The man wakes his wife up because he saw an unicorn in their garden. After telling him that he is a "booby" the woman calls the police and the psychiatrist. When the police arrive they ask the man whether the story about the unicorn is true. He answers that the unicorn is a mythical beast. So the police and psychiatrist think that his wife is the one who is crazy and take her away.
What is different about this fable that it is not – as fables usually are – about animals. A fable is a traditional short story that teaches a moral lesson. But the main characters in this fable are a man and a woman. Even though it is made obvious who is crazy, I think it is the man because mad people are often intelligent and not responsible for their actions. At the beginning the man behaves weirdly, but in the end he denies the story his wife told the police.
The moral of the fable is: "Don’t count your boobies until they are hatched." This means that things you do which are bad for someone else, in the end often turn out to be bad for yourself. I think there could be a better moral for this story, for example:" You’ve got to watch you don’t fall into your own trap." I think this moral expresses more clearly what the author actually wants to say.
The first time I read this fable I found it quite hard to understand who is the crazy person in this story. At the beginning of the text it is not clear who is the mad one, because it looks as if the man is crazy, but at the end one could think it is the woman. I like the story, because the more I thought about this story the more interesting it was to me. (M.S. , 11d, 2004)