The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

he would go to work and bore me nearly to death with some infernal reminiscence of him as long and tedious as it should be useless to me. If that was the design, it certainly succeeded. Twain's...

Three examples of exaggeration in the short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” by Mark Twain include: 1. The narrator revealing what will be in store for him if he inquires of...

The very notion that there would be a young reverend in a mining camp is humorous because mining camps were notorious for all manner of immoral behavior and the absence of virtuous women and men of...

Realism was the tendency of writers and artists in Mark Twain's era (the late 1800s to early 1900s) to create work that reflected real life, without romanticizing anything or making events too...

The story's first paragraph is a confession by the narrator that he had been duped. This kind of self-effacing humor is universally amusing, as it is human nature to laugh at oneself and invite...

The first narrator is very different from Simon Wheeler in a number of ways, including style, his superior understanding and use of grammar and syntax, his address of the reader directly, and his...

The main irony in "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" is that Jim Smiley is outfoxed by the stranger. According to Simon Wheeler: Smiley was monstrous proud of his frog, and well he...

This humorous story by Mark Twain is considered a frame narrative because it consists of a story within a story. The outer story, the frame story, is the story of the narrator's interaction with...

Mark Twain was a master at the art of satire. The significance behind the animal names, fifteen minute nag, Andrew Jackson, and Dan'l Webster is to convey distinct personalities to the reader....

Mark Twain's use of exaggeration is great in this story, and it is one of the aspects that makes it so humorous. For instance, in paragraph 5, Twain is describing the bull pup, Andrew Jackson, a...

In this story, the vernacular is used by Simon Wheeler, a man who relates the tale of Jim Smiley and his trained frog to the narrator. When telling this tale, Simon uses lots of vernacular words,...

The story that Simon Wheeler tells the narrator in "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" was not original with Mark Twain. It was, nevertheless, the first story that caused Twain to...

The first major success for fledgling writer Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) was "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." The story was not Twain's original creation but a well-known tall...

In Mark Twain's "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," the sesterer, Simon Wheeler, exaggerates his description of the frog's talents. For instance, he acts as though the frog were...

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...

In this story, Jim Smiley is outwitted when he makes a bet with a stranger and loses. Remember that Jim Smiley is well-known in Cavaleras County as a man who loves to make bets on pretty much...

It's a very good question, and I would certainly grant that writing in dialect can serve as a barrier to entry. That being said, I think this technique is used very effectively within this story,...

The tone Mark Twain uses in the frame story of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" is one of chagrin mingled with grudging admiration. The unnamed narrator had received a letter from...

Mark Twain's famous short story belongs to (or perhaps even originated) a genre of specifically American satire that survived well into the twentieth century in the form of television comedies such...

Twain uses three elements classic to comedy to create a humorous story. First, as anyone who has read the Lemony Snickett stories knows, warning a reader from the outset that a story will be too...

One of Mark Twain's earliest stories, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" helped to establish Twain as a one of America's greatest humorists. This story illustrates Twain's satirical...

Wheeler uses hyperbole, an exaggeration that is a type of figurative language, when he says of Smiley, "he would foller that straddle-bug to Mexico but what he would find out where he was bound for...

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...

The humorous story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" by Mark Twain has a plot structure using a literary device known as a frame, in which one story is told within another story....

This question reveals one of the story's most humorous elements because the answer is that nothing, in particular, prompts Simon Wheeler to tell the story of Jim Smiley. In fact, as we see in the...

Mark Twain's use of similes in the text heightens the humor found in the piece as well as adds to the Local Color aspects of the story. For instance, when describing Jim Smiley's dog, Andrew...

Here are six more instances of hyperbole to describe Jim Smiley: If there was a horse-race, you'd find him flush, or you'd find him busted at the end of it; if there was a dog-fight, he'd bet on...

The narrator finds Wheeler to be annoying and amusing all at the same time, but is in reality a bit irritated with Wheeler's ramblings, and anxious to escape them. You can find evidence of this...

Simon Wheeler's face is described as expressionless; "he never smiled, he never frowned," meaning that he never gave anything away to the narrator in terms of his mood or intentions other than...

Jim Smiley was a man who was hopelessly addicted to gambling. He placed bets compulsively, but he also invested in gambling seriously as his occupation. He would bet on just about any random event...

The narrator in the story has a friend who is still in "the East," as opposed to the West, where the narrator is living. The narrator's friend writes and asks him to look up a man named Simon...

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...

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...

You may also want to consider Mark Twain's use of colloquialisms and regional dialect in "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." Few American stories of any kind at this time in history...

In the famous short story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" by Mark Twain, the unnamed narrator goes to an old tavern in a mining camp called Angel's for an interview at the...

Framing stories such as this one normally present the inner story as narrated by a very different kind of narrator from the main overall narrator of the piece. Clearly, in this tale, the educated...

Just as Mark Twain would illustrate years later with his novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, his use of realistic regional dialect in "The Celebrated Jumping...

What is interesting about your question is the use of the word "conflict." I can tell by the way you are asking the question that you mean conflict as the "inciting incident" of the story, the one...

The dialect reflected in the speech of Simon Wheeler sets him apart from the narrator, whose manner of speaking involves more sophisticated word choices. Simon Wheeler does not sound like a highly...

The use of the vernacular in literature is a technique that is particularly effective when a story is written, as this one is, in the voice of a storyteller—that is, somebody who is relating the...

Western humorists such as Mark Twain make extensive use of exaggeration, hyperbole. For example, westerner Simon Wheeler exaggerates when describing the frog's talents: "You never see a frog...

The narrator of the inner stories in this Mark Twain classic, Simon Wheeler, tells a string of anecdotes that run into each other—all related to the gambling habit of Jim Smiley. All are humorous,...

In all large countries, regional dialects exist that differ from the standard form of the national language in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. In most of the European nation-states, what...

There are two kinds of irony in Twain's The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. The first That is encountered is verbal irony and the second encountered is situational irony. Verbal irony...

The first metaphor used to describe the horse is "the fifteen minute nag". This is because she looked so sickly and slow that people would give her a head start in a race. She would let the other...

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...

The stranger, Mark Twain, utters the following at the end before he departs: "Oh! hang Smiley and his afflicted cow!" He states that he muttered these words "good-naturedly," which is patently...

This is an interesting question, because it isn't as straightforward as you might think. It is Twain telling the story, so in that sense, it is written in the first person point of view. He says...

First of all, in Mark Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," the story does not see based heavily upon conflict as many stories often do. If I needed to identify conflicts in...

One key feature of Simon Wheeler's storytelling is that he is long-winded, or rambling. The narrator has been asked to visit Simon Wheeler and to inquire about a certain man named Leonidas W....