Fable, comes from the Latin fabûla , which means "conversation, story." It is a very short literary composition, written in verse or prose, featuring animals or inanimate objects that act like people. In general, it tells stories or situations that encourage reflection on the good and bad actions of people, in order to convey some teaching or moral.
Seen as a short story, it would be part of the narrative, but due to its didactic-moralizing intention it would be closer to the didactic. For this reason, fable and apologist have sometimes come to be confused or used as synonyms. The distinguishing feature would be above all in the characters in the fable who are animals.
The literary people who have dedicated themselves to researching this literary form, draw a series of criteria that characterize it and which they believe necessary to adjust to achieve total success to characters and custom, they affirm that if we do not want to lie poetically, we should only attribute to the animals qualities and actions that keep analogy with their instincts and natural properties, or at most with those that popular experience or mythology itself had attributed to them.
Said qualities and actions must be written in a simple and easy style, its dialogue must be appropriate to the characters and situation of its characters, conceived in prose or in verse, although sometimes the two forms are presented in combination.
The origin of the fable dates back to the early days of man, in his need for criticism. There is Aesop in 6th century BC Greece, his collection of fables has inspired all Western literature. A Phaedrus among the Romans, Pelpay among the Indians, La Fontaine in France, Juan Ruíz, Juan Iriarte and Samaniego in Spain, Borner and Hans Sachs in Germany, Gay and Dreyden in England.
The modern fable has as its representative Walt Disney. In his fables, the liveliness, the tenderness, the comic aspect, the natural environment in which the animals move, gives a new character to the fable.
The term fable is also related to rumor, hearsay, uncorroborated information that people comment, or false or invented story. For example: the neighbor's stories are all fables .
