Student Question
What is the narrator's attitude towards Wheeler in The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County?
Quick answer:
The narrator in "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" finds Wheeler both annoying and amusing. He is irritated by Wheeler's long, tedious stories and suspects a friend set him up to endure them. Despite describing Wheeler in unflattering terms, the narrator finds the situation "exquisitely absurd." Although he is eager to escape Wheeler's company, the fact that he retells the story suggests he found some entertainment value in Wheeler's tales.
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 attitude at the beginning of the story, when the narrator is introducing to us just exactly how he heard the story of the jumping frog in the first place. He had a friend tell him to ask Wheeler about Smiley, and concludes that he suspects his friend set him up, in order to trap him into a long conversation with Wheeler. He states that his friend must have known that Wheeler would
"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."
So, he tells us that Wheeler was incredibly boring and told stories that no one cared...
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about. He goes on to describe him in very unflattering terms as "fat and bald-headed" and "simple." He indicates that Wheeler "blockaded" him in the room so he couldn't escape and forced the story down him. The narrator finds this "exquisitely absurd." At the end of the narration, the narrator is so irritated and anxious to leave that he snaps at Wheeler and leaves him right in the middle of another story.
From all of this, we can conclude that the narrator, on the surface, found Wheeler to be incredibly annoying and dull. However, the fact that he even told the story of Wheeler and his tales later on indicates that irritation was not necessarily all there was to it. He found his stories entertaining enough, and the man himself amusing enough to write down a story about it, so, he had to have some merit. I hope that those thoughts helped; good luck1