Childhood Reflection

Rainbow Fish: Equality or Communist?

As a child I was not into reading books or fairy tale stories. I was always into swimming as a young girl, which naturally led me to one particular book. Out of all the children’s books, my favorite was Rainbow Fish. The moral was simple and can still be a lesson to persons of any age. The story tells of a fish with beautiful scales, many of different colors, named Rainbow Fish. He loved his many scales for all its variety. One day a small fish asks Rainbow Fish if he could have one of his shiny beautiful scales, but Rainbow Fish says no because he believes that only he should have the scales. Soon enough he loses his friends since he doesn’t want to share. He feels upset for what happened so he goes and asks for help from a wise octopus. There he is told to give his friends a scale. Eventually all his friends have a unique scale, and Rainbow Fish left with one. No longer greedy, Rainbow Fish is friends with all the other fish and is happy again.

The main elements that drew me to this story were the fish and the shiny scales. I always wanted to be a fish when I was in elementary school because I always loved being in or around water. Like every child, most are attracted to shiny objects, whether that is jewelry or a picture on the front of a book.

When reading this as a child, the moral of the story was to share with your friends and it will make you a happier and better person. Now at a later time, looking back I can see that there are some underlining factors that I could not see without further educating myself. One possible factor is Materialism. Rainbow Fish was vain and the other fish wanted what he possessed. The shiny scales can represent anything from a name brand item to overall wealth of an individual. A more positive factor that is possible in the United States the story promotes Equality. Rainbow Fish had all the scales, which can be seen as power, then shared each scale equally with everyone so that now each “fish” has the same amount of “power”. For some individuals, this supports a Communist mindset, where the wealth is distributed to every citizen. Any person can take this story and see a different perspective. Any person can interpret this story any way they see it. Some may see the story as a political reference; possibly to start molding a child’s mind to see and think in a way that society pushes towards.