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Similes
Style
Explanation and Analysis:
Twain’s writing style in “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” changes depending on if he is writing from the perspective of the well-educated upper-class narrator from the East Coast or from the perspective of the old working-class gold miner, Wheeler. When Twain is writing from the narrator’s perspective (at the beginning and end of the story), his style is much more formal and erudite, as seen in the following passage:
I have a lurking suspicion that Leonidas W. Smiley is a myth; that my friend never knew such a personage; and that he only conjectured that if I asked old Wheeler about him, it would remind him of his infamous Jim Smiley, and he would go to work and bore me to death with some exasperating reminiscence of him as long and as tedious as it should be useless to me.
The narrator explains in formal language how his friend on the East Coast likely sabotaged him by telling him to find Wheeler during his travels west and ask about a man named Leonidas W. Smiley. While the tone here is somewhat funny—the narrator is essentially describing how his friend successfully pranked him—the writing style is quite rigid and scholarly, with the narrator using words like “personage” (rather than “man” or “person”) and “exasperating reminiscence” (rather than “long story”).
When the narrator switches into transcribing Wheeler’s story word-for-word, the writing style changes entirely—Wheeler’s section is written in his working-class Western dialect, with “improper” grammar and spellings. His language is also much livelier than the narrator’s, full of idioms, similes, and emotional exclamations. That the narrator takes the time to honor Wheeler’s voice and story in this way demonstrates that, for all of his frustrations with the man’s “exasperating” story, he also respects Wheeler’s continuation of a unique oral storytelling tradition.
Related Themes:
