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The Story Within the Story: Who Moved My Cheese Essay

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Spencer Johnson uses a story within a story to attempt to catch the reader off-guard and ready for a teachable moment. In the context of a class reunion discussion, the friends begin to catch up and share what has happened in their lives over the years. Some have had success and others have had frustration in their lives. One Character had found the story of Who Moved My Cheese and credited that story as a rich source of help and guidance in navigating the changes of life. From the setting of revealed information, the author shares with the reader the story of Who Moved My Cheese. The story is written in a sort of Aesop’s fable context with two small people (Hem and Haw) and two mice (Sniff and Scurry). The obvious intent is for these …show more content…

Haw is victim to the same problems as Hem but is able to laugh (Haw!) at the situation and begin searching for more cheese. The two mice characters are two only for balance but essentially the same quality of using instinct and a blank slate every day to find that for which they are looking. Operating by the instinct is less productive at first because they are not using their memories to avoid the wrong turns and dead-ends. Sniff and Scurry are victims of their natures and re-invent the path to the cheese every day. The human characters are more successful at first because they find a path that works and keep using it until the cheese runs out. In that predicament, the mice simply continued with their previous natures and searched out another source of cheese. Hem and Haw remained convinced that they simply needed to return to where the cheese was and it would reappear. The two human characters are more distinct than the mice and they begin to diverge in the way they deal with their problem. Eventually the mice find another source of cheese and Haw joins them. The story leaves the reader unaware of the final status of Hem. Once the story is told, Johnson returns to the “real world” to unpack and explain the points of the story. The events are predictable and the lessons learned are not terribly profound. The value of the story is the suspension of reality. People understand that doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results is a definition of

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