Reading Notes: English Fairy Tales, Reading A

 

("Mouse and Mouser" by John D. Batten via Myth-UnTextbook)

The story that I chose to focus my reading notes on for this post is “Mouse and Mouser” by Joseph Jacobs (1890). This story is about a cat and a mouse where the mouse tells the cat about everything that it does while the cat always encourages the mouse by saying that it makes the mouse better to eat. This story is broken up into two lines for each “paragraph” with it switching between the cat and mouse speaking. The cat is denoted by having CAT before the paragraph while MOUSE is always above the paragraph in which the mouse speaks. The first line of each paragraph typically ends with the mouse saying, “my lady” or the cat saying, “good body”. This ending usually appears twice at the end of the first sentence of each paragraph and the second line in the paragraph usually gets rid of one of the saying for example if the first sentence ended in “my lady, my lady” the second sentence would end in only “my lady”. Other than the ending of the sentences, the first and second sentence of each paragraph is identical, so it makes it very repetitive to read. Finally, the last unique thing that I noticed in this story is that sometimes next to either CAT or MOUSE, there is an adjective in parenthesis showing how they are feeling. For example, it could be CAT (sharply) or MOUSE (timidly).