If you come across something strange enough, it will transform your identity.
Emelian the fool was a fool and lazy. He was given the chance to better himself by working, but only after some haranguing did he consent to work. His task was to carry water, but when he drew up the water he also drew up a pike. In exchange for not being eaten, the pike said he would grant any wish. And it was so: Emelian wished the buckets to carry themselves home, and they did. In this, we see the ability of a marginal character, the fool, being able to harness chaotic feminine potential, as there is a closeness between the fool and chaos. It is harder for chaos to get the better of the fool because he is too simple, contains too little higher meaning and thus cannot be easily questioned. And so Emelian becomes the identity that directs the potential whereever he desires, and the carrying of water is a perfect representation of this.
The choice to eat the fish is analogous to naming it, integrating it into your being. However, the consequence of naming something that works by hidden or implicit means is that it loses its power. This is the same pattern as that of the Elves and the Shoemaker, where the hidden work by the elves is lost when they are clothed - that is, given a covering identity. By not eating the pike, Emelian holds the power of the implicit, though he takes the necessary step of making the implicit thing work before trusting it. We could think of this in terms of tribute: a nation promises not to invade another so long as they deliver tribute. Though the taxed nation still retains its identity, it is in debt to the dominant nation.
As Emelian continues to have his work done by the pike, word reaches the tsar of this magician and he commands a solider to bring him to the palace. The solider is rude and so Emelian orders his cudgel to beat the solider up. The Tsar then employs cunning by sending a noble who attempts to persuade him. Specifically, the persuasion is in the form of offering a kaftan - that is, the Tsar is offering some identity to clothe Emelian.
Emelian visits the Tsar's palace and upon seeing the Tsar's daughter, wishes her to fall in love with him, which she of course does. We can see in this that the feminine possibility of the Tsar or 'body' is attracted to the fool because it can see it provides something the tsar is lacking. Thus, the seed of the fool has found a potential landing place, some good ground in which it could grow.
Emelian then leaves, leaving the Tsar to be pestered by his daughter who wants to marry Emelian. Driven to distraction, the Tsar invites Emelian back to the palace. Some versions of the story have the pair being married while others do not, and some mention the Tsar being disgusted at the lack of manners by his son in law. In any case, the Tsar either puts both the daughter and Emelian in a barrel and throws it into the ocean, or banishes his daughter to an island and only Emelian ends up in the barrel. In this, we can see how the centre is unable to cope with something from the margin and seeks to exclude it. However, there are two problems here. The first is that the fool, Emelian, has already captured part of the Tsar's kingdom, and the second is that when a system encounters something extremely weird, the system will be forced to change: its identity will be altered.
In response to the question that the fool poses to the Tsar, the Tsar does not accept the opportunity to integrate the fool by having him as a son-in-law. He does not make a nest for Emelian, the way that the nations of Europe did for the Vikings by giving them land. Instead, he attempts to bind and exclude him, throwing him into death (the barrel can be seen as a kind of tomb, and water is a symbol of death also). By exiling his daughter, he also removes that part of his kingdom that sympathises with Emelian, though this speaks to a problem - the Tsar is giving up body and does not recapture the imagination of his populous. An example of this kind of behaviour can be seen in the attempt of European nations to execute the leaders of religious dissenter groups, and make life as difficult as possible for the laity. However, the fact that the Tsar does not kill fool speaks to the fact that he has a power beyond the Tsar, which is why he tries to restrain him The barrel is a kind of binding, similar to enforcement being used to prevent the seed of the fool propagating
The Tsar has not really dealt with the problem. He as attempted to cut off the marginal thing which questioned his identity, even though he had the chance to make peace with it. The power of the fool is precisely that which will pop up in a forgotten part of the Tsars land and grow so much that the Tsar will be forced to accept its reality: suppressed things always return in force. In the end, the fool gains the Tsar's entire kingdom, just as the Vikings became the kings of Europe.
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