Stories do not need to inform us of anything. They do inform us of things. From The Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, we know something of the people who lived in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the second and third millenniums BCE. We know they celebrated a king named Gilgamesh; we know they believed in many gods; we know they were self-conscious of their own cultivation of the natural world; and …showed first 75 words of 2971 total…

…showed last 75 words of 2971 total…not the seven wise men lay these foundations?" We have taken the ferryman's place by passing the story on -- even if only to ourselves. The narrator tells us once aain that Gilgamesh, worn out with his labor, "engraved on a stone the whole story" . And finally, with the death of Gilgamesh -- the end of the story and the end of the telling of it -- the text returns us to our mortal lives.