![]() When beloved Aunty Mary arrives to scold him once more for his addiction to tobacco, his conscience grows so torpid that he can gleefully seize and destroy it beyond any chance of rebirth. It makes the blunder, however, of materializing as a two-foot dwarf covered with “fuzzy greenish mold” who torments the narrator with intimate knowledge of and contemptuous judgments on his behavior. Here the conscience admits to being the “most pitiless enemy” of its host, whom it is supposed to “improve” but only tyrannizes with gusto while refusing to praise the host for anything. Of more significance is the fact that the story projects Twain’s lifelong struggles with, and even against, his conscience. ![]() In “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut,” in which Twain again uses first-person narration with a flawless touch for emphasizing the right word or syllable, the main character closely resembles the author in age, experience, habits, and tastes. Her stirringly recounted memories challenged the legend of the Old South even before that legend reached its widest vogue, and her spirit matched her “mighty” body so graphically that “A True Story” must get credit for much more craftsmanship than is admitted by its subtitle, “Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It.” The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut Contemporaries praised “A True Story” for its naturalness, testimony that Twain was creating more lifelike blacks than any other author by allowing them greater dignity, and Rachel is quick to insist that slave families cared for one another just as deeply as any white families. While she, in turn, finds scars confirming their relationship on his wrist and head, this conventional plot gains resonance from Rachel’s report of how her husband and seven children had once been separated at a slave auction in Richmond. Having been encouraged by the contemporary appeal for local color, Twain quickly developed a narrator with a heavy dialect and a favorite folk- saying that allows a now-grown son to recognize his mother after a separation of thirteen years. In 1874, Twain assured the sober Atlantic Monthly that his short story “A True Story” was not humorous, although in fact it has his characteristic sparkle and hearty tone. Twain’s use of the oral style is nowhere better represented than in “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” which exemplifies the principles of the author’s essay “How to Tell a Story.” A True Story ![]() Especially adroit is the deadpan manner of Wheeler, who never betrays whether he himself appreciates the humor and the symmetry of his meanderings. The skill of the story can be more conclusively identified, from the deft humanizing of animals to the rising power and aptness of the imagery. Most attempts to find profundity in this folk anecdote involve the few enveloping sentences attributed to an outsider, who may represent the literate easterner being gulled by Simon Wheeler’s seeming inability to stick to his point. In “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” Jim Smiley’s eagerness to bet on anything in the mining camp may strain belief, but it is relatively plausible that another gambler could weigh down Smiley’s frog, Daniel Webster, with quailshot and thus win forty dollars with an untrained frog. ![]() “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” is generally regarded as Twain’s most distinctive story, although some readers may prefer Jim Baker’s bluejay yarn, which turns subtly on the psyche of its narrator, or Jim Blaine’s digressions from his grandfather’s old ram, which reach a more physical comedy while evolving into an absurdly tall tale. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County ![]() In spite of their faults, Twain’s stories captivate the reader with their irresistible humor, their unique style, and their spirited characters who transfigure the humdrum with striking perceptions. Except when adapting a plot taken from oral tradition, Twain does better with patently artificial situations, which his genius for suggesting authentic speech makes plausible enough. Therefore, they too seldom interact effectively. Rather, just as Twain alternated between polarities of attitude, his characters tend to embody some extreme unitary state either of villainy or (especially with young women) of unshakable virtue. Although deeply divided himself, Twain seldom created introspectively complex characters or narrators who are unreliable in the Conradian manner. His best stories are narrated by first-person speakers who are seemingly artless, often so convincingly that critics cannot agree concerning the extent to which their ingenuousness is the result of Twain’s self-conscious craft. Many readers find Mark Twain (Novem– April 21, 1910) most successful in briefer works, including his narratives, because they were not padded to fit some extraneous standard of length. ![]()
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