A fable is story that is written to convey a moral or lesson. Thus, to read Erdrich's "The Fat Man's Race" as a fable, we would have to concentrate on discovering what lesson or lessons it is trying to communicate.

This story is a first-person narrative that a woman is telling her grandchildren. She says that she was engaged to a man named Cuthbert who loved to eat. This leads to the grandmother's revelation that she had also had sex with the devil, who seduced her by acting like a "good angel."

The grandmother is angered that Cuthbert must have talked about her affair with the devil to his sisters, because they know about it. She plots revenge on Cuthbert and dreams up a knife to kill him with, then enacts the murder in her dreams. The next day, she is "haunted" by the nightmare and yet goes ahead to the Feast of the Assumption to hear to priest reading the banns announcing that she will marry Cuthbert.

We can derive several morals from this story, which in addition to morals, has the timeless, placeless quality of a fable. The first moral is the warning the grandchildren hear that the devil can trick us by pretending to be good. Another interpretation could be that we can deal with negative emotions in our dreams rather than letting it interfere with our waking life.