The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County | "The Deadpan on Simon Wheeler''
This excerpted essay asserts that the satire in "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County'' is pointed at the narrator (Mark Twain) rather than Simon Wheeler, who emerges as the superior character that Twain supposes himself to to be.
In the encounter between Mark Twain and Simon Wheeler which frames the story of "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" we are, apparently, expected to agree with the narrator, Mark Twain, that the "good natured, garrulous" miner is a comic butt. Wheeler tells his story, according to Mark Twain, like a simpleton:
He never smiled, he never frowned, he never changed his voice from the gentle-flowing key to which he tuned his initial sentence, he never betrayed the slightest suspicion of enthusiasm;...
[The entire page is 1561 words long]
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