![]() The second part of the tale concerns another creature Smiley bets on, for Jim Smiley emerges as a devoted gambler, a risk taker who thrives on the challenge of not knowing for certain any outcome yet always calculating his ventures very carefully. Surely, Jim Smiley himself practices this motto, for no matter where he goes, he continues to try to win money. She represents the lesson that winning results from effort and a failure to give up. This story, divided into what some consider three symbolic parts, begins with an introduction to Jim Smiley and his mare-an asthmatic beast that consistently wins races and money for Jim precisely because of her determination and in spite of her somewhat slow pace. Smiley instead, Simon Wheeler launches into the “exasperating reminiscence” of “his infamous Jim Smiley” (1), and the frame narrator must sit politely and listen to what he considers a long, drawn-out, useless narration. ![]() Smiley, and he must compose a letter of explanation to the friend who sent him seeking.īut the frame narrator cannot find Leonidas W. The story even employs an allusion to epistolary form, for the frame narrator begins by explaining that a friend’s letter sent him to hunt for a friend, the Reverend Leonidas W. This early work’s biggest complication stems from its use of a double narrator: the frame narrator-a persona that adopts Mark Twain’s fictive voice and listens to the other narrator-and the Jim Smiley tale narrator-Simon Wheeler. Mark Twain presents him not as someone to pity or scorn, not as someone to make fun of, but rather as someone merely to recognize, for in this early tale, while Twain uses some satire, he passes no judgment, for he has not yet reached the late stage of his career and the biting cynicism that eventually colored those late works. In spite of its deliberately far-fetched nature-for readers commence ready to hear a tale of truth, gradually begin to feel its implausibility, and finally perceive its impossibility- its protagonist, Jim Smiley, represents a human being with whom all readers can identify, for like all humans, he is fl awed, and he cannot stop his habitual behavior, no matter its consequences. Repeatedly published-sometimes under slightly different names-and frequently used in Twain’s lecture tours, it may have developed from an experience Twain himself had as he stayed at a mining camp and listened to the men’s stories. ![]() Analysis of Mark Twain’s The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras CountyĪ tall tale laced with typical Twainian humor and irony and ultimately meant not to be believed but enjoyed, Mark Twain’s (Samuel Langhorne Clemens’s) “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” first appeared in an 1865 issue of the Saturday Press and eventually became part of the 1875 collection Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old.
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