Riddles Present New Ways of Looking at Things

The riddle can accomplish certain things by inviting the riddlee to awaken to a new vision of the world. It is not a form well suited to all sorts of discourse, however. According to Cohen (1996),

It is clear that the riddle is not the best way of communicating about unknown things. If we want to learn from another person about something that he knows and we do not, a genuine question would serve us better than any riddle. On the other hand, if we want to communicate our experiences and our ideas, we may use any of many possible expressions, from the prosaic and literal to the elaborate and artistic, without having to be confined to the riddle format. (311)

So the riddle is best at giving a new perspective on something already familiar in certain ways, in reorganizing our perception or thinking. "The process involved is inherently enigmatic and also transformative: the transition effected leaves reality changed, restructured, its basic categories restated, recognized, affirmed" (Hasan-Rokem and Shulman 1996, 4).The riddle thus excels at recategorization and transformation-both of the external world and the world of our consciousness. Certain IF works, including Wishbringer, A Mind Forever Voyaging, and Shade, present IF worlds that change during the course of the narrated events and relate to this aspect of the riddle in a particularly interesting way that I consider later.

There are interesting points made in these anonymous comments about the riddle:

For a good enigma we must have a perfectly true description of a thing: every term used must be as scrupulously appropriate as in a logical definition; but it must be so ingeniously phrased and worded that the sense is not obvious, and the interpreter is baffled. There is vast room for the development of skill in this art, to make an enigma such that it shall be not merely obscure, but at the same time stimulating to the curiosity. A further step is to give it the charm of poetic beauty. This is quite germane to the nature of the enigma, which has a natural affinity with the epigrammatic form of poetry. (Cornhill Magazine 1891)