Final Section of Juha

The Tales of Juha was a roller coaster of humor.  It started of slowly, with some funny stories, some not-so-funny stories. The middle section was by far my favorite.  The stories were significantly funnier and made more sense.  However, the last section left me disappointed with the book as a whole.  During the last section, I barely laughed nor did I fully understand many of the stories.  Similar to the activities in class, I decided to pick out a story that I thought best represented the following adjectives: funny, surprising, and clever.

FUNNY:

One of my favorite stories came from the first section, Juha as the butt.  The story explains a scene where Juha is with a group of people who are all mounting their horses.  Juha mounts his horse backwards and replies to their laughter with “ What are you laughing at? Just because my mule’s put its head to the back and its buttocks to the front.” I found Juha’s response humorous for the fact that he was so naive and absentminded.  Either he didn’t realize the people were laughing at him, or he was trying to play off the fact he was riding his mule wrong.  In both circumstances, Juha is shown in a negative light as the stupid one of the group.  This lighthearted story allowed me to laugh at Juha’s stupidity, and be thankful it wasn’t me getting mocked.

SURPRISING:

In the further sections, some of the stories took a violent and somewhat disturbing tone.  On page 111, the story of the customer, baker, and a governor.  The governor smelled a goose that was cooking and ordered the baker to give it to him.  When the customer who the goose was originally intended for returned, he became angry with the baker.  He began to chase the baker, which led to some not so desirable outcomes.  Throughout the chasing process, he killed a pregnant woman’s unborn child and an innocent bystander, and cut off the tail of Juha’s donkey.  This story seemed harsh and reminded me of the dark humor presented in slaughterhouse 5.  The killings were shown in such a matter of fact way and did not receive the justice they deserved. In fact, the only person that wasn’t charged for complaining to the courts about their misfortunate event was Juha, who was the least emotionally armed.

CLEVER:

On page 128, Juha is shown as a judge figure. He is presented with a dispute between two men.  The first was angry that he did not receive his agreed upon paid for helping the second man carry a heavy load.  However, the payment of dispute was “nothing”.  In return, Juha had the man lift up a book and asked what was underneath it, to which the man replied, “Nothing.”  Juha told the man to take that nothing and leave.  I felt this entire situation and especially the way Juha handled the argument to be interesting and clever.  Juha was able to give the man exactly what he asked for in a way that the man could recognize.

In all, the last section was a bet of a struggle to read.  I found some little gems within, but as a whole, I was not pleased.