Isak Dinesen always called her stories "tales". The use of this word signifies her role, the classic role of the story-teller, as a modem Scheherazade. Her faith in The Story leads her to the old forms of story-telling, the oral tradition, as a way of recovering "the divine art". Her use of the oral tradition characterizes her method of story-telling, which draws on the stories of Bible, the Norse sagas, and classic collections of folk tales as the inspirations behind her subject matter. Her first and foremost goal in the tales is to show the magical power of The Story, in order to provide people with new insights and renewed faith in life within our limited, mortal capacity. Her eloquent assertion in defense of The Story reveals itself everywhere in her tales, most vividly in "The Immortal Story" in which the hero violates the nature of Story by making a sailor`s story into a fact. He wishes to control and to create the world about him and enjoys his omnipotence, and his impudence reaches to the extent that his perverted desire to make a story into reality. But his death of spirit, the severing of the connection with the creative force of Story, eventually imprisons him into the final loss of Story, along with the loss of his own life. Mr. Clay, the lover of fact, is the object of a very powerful satire. He is not only without imagination but, most striking of all, without memory, personal memory that shades off into cultural memory and tells that all of life becomes a great story in which we human beings have our own little story to enact to the best of our ability and knowledge. In dealing with a man who tries to make a story into life without any insight into what is "the greater pattern of our destiny", Dinesen sets forth the essential Question: "Who am I?"