Style and Mark Twain

Any author=s style, or variety of styles, is informed by his purpose in telling the story and the thematic subtexts being conveyed. In the case of Mark Twain, the immediate purpose is to entertain with a well-told tale, while the usual sub purpose is satirize the objective world and the cultural conventions Twain disdained or despised. In his most famous short story, AThe Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County@, the object of the satire, according to James D. Wilson, is Athe confrontation of East and West, genteel and vernacular values, implicit in the story=s double frame structure@ (171), while the subject of derision is the American tall tale. A man named Simon Wheeler tells the author a long and rambling three-part story about a gambler named Jim Smiley when the author is inquiring after the Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley. The story=s point is a discourse on Jim Smiley=s jumping frog, which in the end is a joke on the reader, who has been gently made to think while being amused by this story without a clear ending and seemingly without a moral.

The Innocents Abroad, the book that made Twain internationally famous, is a critique of the Old World of Europe and the guidebooks to it that presume the superiority of that world=s values to those of the present. However, it was not originally written as a book but as a series of newspaper columns. In preparing it as a major work for mass consumption, commercial needs dictated an overhaul of his newspaper style. Notes Don Floren

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th Tom, saw who really did it. As if this were not enough, rather than let Becky take the blame for tearing a color plate in the schoolmaster=s anatomy book, he takes it himself, which gets him a severe flogging. AIn a conventional Sunday school book,@ Camfield notes, Aself-sacrifice is of course the highest good, but would be rewarded not punished . . . Clemens makes clear that Tom, as much as he usually loves to >show off,= does not act here in order to earn praise, he sacrifices himself out of sympathy . . . Clemens thus outflanks his Sunday School-book enemies on the sentimental side@ (115). The schoolmaster is shown to be a brute taking out his thwarted ambition to be a doctor on Tom, making the reader cringe at the idea of this martinet becoming an M.D. Although a good deal of the book is a contrast of mischievous bad boy Tom with his calculating and cynical good boy brother, Sid, Franklin R. Rogers argues that Ato conclude that the basic structure of the book comes from model-boy literature is inaccurate. The theme of model boy versus bad boy, concentrated in the first chapters, occupies a relatively small amount of space in the novel. . . From Chapter VI to the end of the book it disappears@ (106). Not quite. Sid is still

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