ideas. The Vietnamese are also "adept in using mythological elements to
create a break - through in the artistic quality of a folk tale" (Ibid.: 2432),
the two most often used techniques being contrasts: the opaque contrasted
against the obvious, the imaginative against the real, and novelty: magical
morphological transformations of the characters and in the development of
the events. This gives Vietnamese folk stories their unique attraction
Nguyen Dong Chi, indeed, has explored the depths of the folk stories and
captured the very essence of their beauty. As he once claimed, "the charm
of almost all Vietnamese folk stories lies not in their fiction but in the
skillful blend and transposition of the mythical and the realistic. The reality
is mistaken for the unreal, the unbelievable is wrapped up in the
believable." (Nguyen Dong Chi: 2439-2440). This is an important element
that helps the author is his statistics, comparative study and classification of
folk stories and that enables him to identify the "indigenous traces"
(Nguyen Dong Chi: 2452) or generation in spite of the fact that two thirds
of Vietnamese folk stories are found to have their non-native origins and
the complication caused by the intermixture of world stocks of folklore.
4. Nguyen Dong Chi also points out the relationship between the
Vietnamese thought patterns and the interaction between the good and the
evil in Vietnamese folklore. Folk stories are characteristically structured
along the single-track development ending in the good prevailing over the
bad or the just over the evil. This is in line with the naive imagination of
the people in the old times. However, each people will have their ways of
restructuring folk stories in the molds of their native thinking. Nguyen
Dong Chi has painstakingly identified four general structural patterns: The
good eventually prevail over the evil not because of annihilation but
through persuasion and redemption; by the struggle within the bad; and the
good has to pay a price on its victory for its "excesses".
