Reading Notes: English Fairy Tales, Reading B

 

("Johnny-Cake" by John D Batten via MYTH UN-Textbook)

The story that I chose to focus my reading notes on for this post is “Johnny-Cake” by Joseph Jacobs (1890). This story is based around a cake that escaped the oven and caused everyone to chase after him until in the end, he was eaten by a fox. This story seems like an accumulative story which I saw in last week’s readings as the story is somewhat repetitive but keeps on building on top of itself. It seems like an accumulative story as the story continues with the same lines where Johnny-cake is running away from everyone until he meets someone new and tells them who he has outrun. Then he bets that he can outrun them too and the people he meets ends up chasing him. This same plot and lines are the same throughout the entire story with the only thing changing is exactly who is chasing him. In the end, Johnny-cake gets caught by a fox who outsmarts him by saying that he can’t hear Johnny-cake causing Johnny-cake to get closer to the fox. The fox then eats him up and that’s the end of Johnny-cake. I enjoyed the ending because Johnny-cake ends up getting tricked by an animal that is known to be very cunning. In the end, when Johnny-cake is talking to the fox, the entire paragraph is in capital letters probably to signify that Johnny-cake is yelling at the fox so that the fox can hear him. One final thing that I would like to add is that this story uses unique words or older words such as ye or ditch-digger.

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