Analysis: The Celebrated Jumping Frog Of Calavers County
582 Words3 Pages
Brandon Hayes
11/17/14
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” is a framed narrative that was Mark Twain’s first big success. It depicts a story of a sophisticated Easterner who was given the task to travel to California in order to inquire information on Leonidas W. Smiley. The easterner is instructed to talk to old man Wheeler, who is a loquacious westerner, because he supposedly knows Leonidas Smiley. Instead of Old Man Wheeler telling the foreigner about Leonidas, he is reminded of a man with the same surname and begins to tell a drawn out story of Jim Smiley. Throughout the story Twain uses the contrast between the westerners provincial language and the sophisticated dialect of the easterner. The framed narrative presents abrupt transitions of the characters customs and emphasizes the diversity. In the story, Mark Twain promotes regionalism between the two cultures and develops the realism of the story to the reader.…show more content… Old Man Wheeler’s storytelling to the westerners were common, but to the easterner, his stories seemed time-consuming and pointless. When Old Man Wheeler told the story, he used what seemed to be uneducated and peculiar language to the easterner. He uses words like, “feller” and “dangdest”, while the easterner was proper and polite. To readers in the west Old Man Wheeler’s dialect is common and comforting, but to readers in the east, he is most likely to be perceived as uneducated. This further shows the differences, and the stereotypes of the two