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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
In Mark Twain’s short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” a man named Simon Wheeler describes an “uncommon lucky” gambler named Jim Smiley who is “always ready and laying for a...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
One could argue that the moral of the story is that just about anyone can be fooled, no matter how smart or educated they are. This is a perfectly plausible answer as it's in keeping with a similar...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
A master of comedy, Mark Twain employs several comic devices in his short story "The Celebrated Frog of Calaversas County." HYPERBOLE In his description of Jim Smiley, Simon Wheeler exaggerates the...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
The key to noticing the difference between the two narrators in the story is to look at the language and diction used. For instance, the first narrator writes with a polished and formal diction,...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
In the exposition of his humorous story, Mark Twain as narrator observes that the fat, bald-headed and simple Simon Wheeler is sincere in his recounting of his tall tales, ...all through the...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
In his humorous story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, Mark Twain makes clever use of irony in separating the true from the false. He does this through the use of three types of...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
A humorist who made extensive use of exaggeration that made incidents become comical, Mark Twain has followed in this story the pattern of the western style of exaggeration in his short story, "The...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
The use of authentic dialogue helps differentiate the characters and adds to the satire of the story. When Twain speaks, he uses standard, grammatical English. When Simon Wheeler speaks, he uses...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
This 1865 short story by Mark Twain is indeed a social satire. His target in this story were people who subscribed to regional stereotypes in 19th century America. Easterners were stereotyped as...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
In "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," the narrator tells a story that he says he heard from another man, Simon Wheeler. In telling the tale of how a third man, Jim Smiley, was...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
Mark Twain spent a period of time in the Wild West of the mid-to-late 19th century, and regionalism plays a key aspect of his classic short story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County."...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
American Realism of the late nineteenth century was often satirical, and Twain's subject in this story is the assumptions that people make about one another based on where they live or were born or...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavaras County is a frame story, a story told by one character to another. This can make the identification of one protagonist and one antagonist problematic. In...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
To some extent the answer to this question is up to individual reader opinion. There are times when I feel that the use of dialect is detrimental to the story. This occurs when the dialect is so...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
In the opening paragraph, the narrator provides a frame for the entire story, reporting that a friend of his asked him to go and visit a man named Simon Wheeler. This Wheeler turns out to be an...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
Jim Smiley about whom Simon Wheeler tells the narrator, is a man who would bet on anything: "...he was the curiousest man about always betting on anything that turned up you ever see, if he could...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
The conflict is that he is sent to learn about the Reverand Leonidas W. Smiley and Simon Wheeler proceeds to tell him about Jim Smiley. A trick has been played on the narrator which he discovers...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
You have asked a very interesting question because at first glance, these two stories appear very different. Twain writes his story with characteristic understated humour, combining use of...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
The framework narrator has this to say about Simon Wheeler and his story: ...if I asked old Wheeler about him, it would remind him of his infamous Jim Smiley, and he would go to work and bore me...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
There is a sense in which this story is a lot about 19th century America and the huge culture clash between the Eastern, settled part of America and the Western part which was still being settled...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
The main character of Mark Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," Jim Smiley (not Leonidas W. Smiley) is obviously an addict to any form of gambling and a true character of the...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
Jim is opportunistic, obsessive, sneaky, and ultimately naive. 1. Jim is opportunistic: the storyteller, Simon Wheeler, describes Jim as "lucky," but really Jim's supposed luck comes from his habit...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
First of all, the story's called "The Celebrated Frog of Calaveras County." Calaveras County is located in the state of California, 135 miles east of San Francisco, smack in the heart of California...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
To me, the conflict between East and West is presented by the predicament that the narrator finds himself in. While it is not said that he is an Easterner, he is at least acting on behalf of a...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
The ending of this short story, which is actually said by Twain himself rather than an anonymous stranger, is ironic because it shows how Twain recognises he has been the victim of a "tall story"...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
The narrator seeks out Simon Wheeler because the narrator's friend back East requested that the narrator find Simon and ask him about another guy, named Leonidas W. Smiley. Presumably because the...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
This hilarious story by Mark Twain is perhaps one of the most famous literary examples of a tall tale, which can be defined as a humorous story characterised by outrageous exaggeration and...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
One of the ways that Twain sets up the story to be humorous is by making Simon Wheeler into a sort of straight man. The narrator describes him as telling this rather ridiculous tale about Leonidas...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
Jim Smiley was a gamblin’ man – as Simon Wheeler tells the narrator, “he was the curiosest man about always betting on anything that turned up you ever see.” He would make a bet, and if no one...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
Twain uses the dialect of rural California to fully characterize Wheeler with local color. Wheeler uses descriptive language to describe things in a way that uses local color, or dialect...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
First we have to establish the conflict. The conflict is that the narrator of the original story (not the framed story which is narrated by Simon Wheeler) is looking for Leonidas W. Smiley and is...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
There is a sense in which this hilarious tale can be read as something of a cutting commentary about American society in the time of writing. Note the way in which Easterners are presented as being...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
Jim Smiley's frog, Dan'l Webster, was a well-trained amphibian that Smiley used to enhance his winnings at gambling. Smiley had invested heavily in Dan'l. Although he was just a common bullfrog...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
Overall, most of the characters in "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" are not painted in a very flattering light. The characters demonstrate ignorance, laziness, an addiction to...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
The first narrator is seemingly well-educated and as pretentious as it gets. His language and his condescending tone and description of Simon Wheeler give the impression that he (narrator) is upper...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
Twain uses several literary devices in "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County". The first technique we notice is that the tale is a "frame story". That means that one story, the story...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
In this story, Jim Smiley is the most compulsive gambler you could ever hope to meet. So I would say that what he is willing to do is to bet on just about anything. One of the things he likes to...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
The answer to this question can be found in the text of the story. Jim Smiley has trained his frog Dan'l Webster to be a good jumper. According to Simon Wheeler, Smiley did nothing for three months...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
In the story, the narrator is asked by a friend of his to see if he can find anything out about a guy named Leonidas Smiley. Smiley was a friend of the narrator's friend. So the narrator goes and...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
You have identified one of the hallmarks of Twain's narrative style - his use of vernacular, or common speak. Twain sought to capture the voices of the people he wrote about, so instead of writing...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
According to the opening paragraph, the narrator's friend simply wanted to have some contact with his friend's friend Leonidas W. Smiley. The narrator's friend wrote him "from the East." In those...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
There are several tricksters in Mark Twain's "The Celebrated (or Notorious) Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." The first is the talkative slacker, Simon Wheeler, who the narrator seeks out for...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
Jim Smiley is pretty much the main character in this story. I would say that he is what my grandparents used to call a "character." In other words, he's kind of eccentric. His main characteristic...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
The word "vernacular" in this case sort of means something like slang or informal language as opposed to the sort of formal, educated language that you often see in literature. Mark Twain has...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
Three of the animals in this story are named:The Fifteen Minute Nag, Andrew Jackson, and Dan'l Webster;The horse gets her name from being so slow in races--at least at first--but somehow, she...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
One of the themes of this story is the "culture clash" between the eastern and western parts of the United States during this time period. In those times (and to some degree still) the East was...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
There is both direct and indirect characterization of Smiley. Direct characterization is when the narrator tells the reader a character’s traits. Indirect characterization is when the reader...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
The humor of this story lies in the answer to this question, so it’s a very important one. First, it’s important to understand the overall narrative structure of this short story. It’s a frame...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
Humorists such as Mark Twain capitalize upon the "local color" and regional dialects in order to develop the characters of their narratives. Taking these elements and exaggerating them generates...
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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
In "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" by Mark Twain the narrator gets involved with Simon Wheeler and his rambling story telling because of the narrator's friend. This friend...
