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Literary Devices
Dialect
Explanation and Analysis—The Old West Dialect:
In the dialogue between the miners at Roaring Camp, Harte attempts to capture their particular Old West dialect. This dialect comes across in the informal ways in which the men speak, along with specific spelling and grammar choices that Harte makes. Take, for example, the following passage, in which the miners respond to meeting baby Luck for the first time:
As the procession filed in, comments were audible,—criticisms addressed, perhaps, rather to Stumpy, in the character of showman, —“Is that him?” “mighty small specimen”; “hasn’t mor’n got the color”; “ain’t bigger nor a derringer.”
Harte shows off his ability to capture the ways these rugged miners would actually speak. Their speech is characterized by clipped sentences in which the subject disappears, such as “mighty small specimen" and “hasn’t mor’n got the color.” The latter phrase also features unique grammar possibly influenced by some of the miners' British backgrounds. The sentence, not in dialect, roughly translates to “he doesn’t have the color” (meaning baby Lucky is not dark-skinned like his mother, Cherokee Sal). It’s also worth noting that the comparison of the baby to a “derringer” is a reference to a specific type of pistol that the other characters would understand—another way that Harte captures the local dialect.
All of these subtle changes to spelling and grammar—along with language that situates the men in a specific social circle—contribute to the believability of Harte’s use of dialect. Additionally, the roughness of the dialect communicates the ruggedness and brutality of the Old West as a whole.
Related Themes:
