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Situational Irony
Style
Explanation and Analysis:
"The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” like most of Bret Harte’s short fiction, is narrated in the omniscient third person, with occasional forays by the narrator into the first person. A wide gap exists between the voice of the narrator (which is erudite, restrained, and formal) and the vernacular speech of Harte’s characters. Here, for example, the narrator describes the “outcasts” joining together in song to distract themselves from the cold:
Haply the time was beguiled by an accordion, produced somewhat ostentatiously by Tom Simson from his backpack. Notwithstanding some difficulties attending the manipulation of this instrument [...] the crowning festivity of this evening was reached in a rude camp-meeting hymn [...] I fear that a certain defiant tone and Covenanter’s swing to its chorus, rather than any devotional quality, caused it speedily to infect the others.
In this passage, the diction in which Harte’s narrator speaks is almost performatively buttoned-up and old-fashioned, “haply” being a word more commonly used in Shakespearean English than 19th-century American short stories. In the first half of “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” the author deliberately creates distance between the narrator and the lives of the outcasts for whom he accounts. Even the first-person interjection here seems to be used to criticize and disassociate the narrator themselves from the “rude” and “defiant” group of “outcasts.” Later in the story, however, Harte’s argument that people are more than simply good or bad, and that the “outcasts” were unfairly treated, is actually enhanced by the narrator’s previous distance. Their tragic situation is made to seem even more tragic by the way the narrator draws closer to each character, and becomes more compassionate toward them all by the end. If, the author seems to say, even an omniscient narrator can be moved by their plight, shouldn’t every reader also sympathize with the “outcasts”?
Harte’s style of representing speech from these characters also paints a vivid picture of life in the Old West. This stylistic choice is typical of Harte’s work as a Naturalist writer interested in the Western frontier at this time. The “withdrawn” narrative style allows for the incorporation of both specific and wide-ranging descriptions of the natural and social world, its large-scale, “magically changing” landscapes, and its minute obsessions with “propriety." The author vividly describes the weather, which "rends", destroys, and threatens, and the majestic landscape, where "pines rock," and the flames of bonfires "leap heavenward."
Aside from the Old Western dialect in which the characters primarily communicate, some interesting features of frontier speech from this time remain present in the story, as borrowed words and letters from other languages. For instance, when Oakhurst is describing the valley which leads out of the area they have camped in, Harte's narrator calls it a “cañon,” a loan-word from Spanish meaning “canyon.”
