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 Florence, ATwain has extensively revised his newspaper letters for the book, deleting some passages, altering others, and writing new sections to provide continuity or to replace letters that had miscarried. In particular, Twain removes or tones down much of the newspaper irreverence and vulgarity@ (63).
Twain did the same In Roughing It, his sequel to The Innocents Abroad, but with a twist. His authorial style is that of a greenhorn traversing the American West. Ri...