Tricksters! or, Murdering Rabbits.

Tricksters abound throughout literature and cultural tradition. Almost every group of people has had at least one central trickster figure, most being relatively nonviolent (or at least nonlethal). Brer Rabbit, for example, would frequently dupe people, but as he escaped at the end, the people he duped would still fundamentally be living. For the most part, this seems to hold true across cultures, applying fairly well to American Indian folklore as well. The stories follow a formula: a creature like Coyote decides to get something, realizes he has to trick someone to do it, successfully fools them, goes back and repeats the trick several times, and is ultimately duped himself. Occasionally, to mix things up, he recovers from the dupe and re-tricks the person who caught him, reasserting his dominance.

This is not to knock the stories present; all of them are engaging, often hilarious encounters that benefit from the episodic structure. But there’s an expectation on the reader’s part that the story will be relatively weightless—someone might burn a part of their back off, or lose a tail, but that’s the extent of the damage their mischief-making causes. That’s what makes the character of Rabbit, specifically in the story “Little Rabbit Fights the Sun,” so shocking. In the beginning of the story, Rabbit falls asleep in the sun, which burns a brown spot onto his back. Waking up, incensed by this, Rabbit decides to kill the sun. He moves throughout the world, slaughtering everything in his path in gleeful displays of trickery, leading to his final goal. The shocker in all of this? He succeeds.

Little Rabbit said: “Why did these foolish people get in my way? I am in a killing mood; I am going to fight the sun. I’ll make an end of anyone trying to stop me!”

Then he saw two men making arrowheads out of hot rocks. He watched them for a while from behind a tree. Then he went up to them, saying, “Let me help you.” …He seized them and held them down onto the red-hot stones, and they were consumed by heat and fire until only their ashes remained. “Lie there,” said Little Rabbit, “until you can get up again!” He laughed, saying: “This is good practice for fighting Sun!”

Rabbit spouts out one-liners with the regularity of a machine, all of them unnerving in their callousness towards death. And Little Rabbit keeps trucking on. As the story progresses, he comes close to death multiple times and reveals himself as an indestructible force. He’s essentially an ancient Rambo with a sense of humor and a more barbaric endgame.

After killing reams of people, Rabbit arrives at the end of the world, and waits for the sun. He bounces his magic ball into the sun, exploding it and scattering its parts throughout the whole world.

They were scattered all over the world, setting the earth on fire. The flames burned Little Rabbit’s toes, then his legs, body, and arms, until only his head was left. It rolled on all by itself until the terrible heat burst his swollen eyes, which exploded in a flood of tears that covered the whole earth and put out the fire. It took a long time until Sun and Little Rabbit had re-created themselves.

That image alone is terrifying and nightmarish. The very idea of a giant rabbit head, weeping tears out of an exploded set of eyes, sounds more at home on the cover of a metal album than in an indigenous trickster tale. Yet it fits in with the bleak almost-nihilism of the story. Even after destroying the entire world, the indefatigable Rabbit is reborn and goes on with his life.  One can picture him laughing at his exploits for years to come. Despite the death that fills it, the tale doesn't seem so different from the rest of the trickster tales, after all.