Stories and Storytelling Theme Analysis

The Mahabharata is a long story that contains many smaller stories. Technically, almost the entire poem is a monologue that Ugraśravas narrates to Śaunaka, but Ugraśravas essentially disappears for most of the poem. Instead, the poem centers on a conversation between Vaiśampayana and Janamejaya at the snake ceremony, a nested story within Ugraśravas’s monologue. The most famous sections of the text involve an even more deeply nested story, with Vaiśampayana describing a series of conversation between Dhritarashtra and Samjaya. This complicated structure of stories within stories reflects the Mahabharata’s own likely origins as an oral tradition passed down by people retelling the story in person, and it raises the question of why people tell stories like the Mahabharata in the first place.

The answer to that question is that stories have power, and in the case of the Mahabharata, this power is arguably quite literal, with Ugraśravas saying that whoever recites the whole Mahabharata will achieve victory themselves. Stories also frequently serve instructional or illustrative purposes, with wise characters like Krishna using stories from history or about the gods in order to help teach his audience a lesson. The poem concludes with the declaration that anyone who studies the stories of the Mahabharata will purify themselves as fully as if they’ve bathed in the waters of a holy lake. As a story about stories, the Mahabharata questions its own reason for existing, ultimately coming to the conclusion that stories benefit both the teller and the audience by imparting knowledge and giving moral instruction.