Parable

A parable is a succinct, didactic story, in prose or verse, that illustrates one or more instructive lessons or principles. The dividing line from the fable is the cast: fables employ animals, plants, inanimate objects or forces of nature as characters, while parables have human characters. The word comes from the Greek parabole, literally a throwing alongside, extended to mean comparison or analogy. The named shelf is dominated by religious teaching: the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son in the Gospels, Nathan's ewe lamb in 2 Samuel, and a parable tradition in the Quran.

For writers the parable is the fable's realistic sibling, and its constraint is compression: one human situation folded into a page or two, with no fantastic cast to carry the meaning. That brevity plus a moral is the same complete-arc economy flash fiction inherited, and like the fable the form sits inside folklore without the sacred weight of myth.