Along with the regionalistic narrators, both stories show regionalistic qualities in their themes. In “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” the theme is cunning and cleverness. Jim Smiley shows he is cunning and clever by winning every bet he ever made. Although, after making a bet with a stranger in which he believes knows nothing about frogs, he bets him forty dollars that his frog can outjump any frog in Calaveras county, but he surprisingly doesn't win. After making the bet, the stranger claims he doesn't have a frog, so Simley leaves his frog and the forty dollars he bet behind with the stranger to go down to the swamp to fetch him a frog.
A California town, outcasts, cheaters, a battle against nature and jumping frogs… that might sound like the premise for an epic novel, but these are a mix of elements from two separate short stories, The Outcasts of Poker Flat by Bret Harte and The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain. Harte’s story follows John Oakhurst, a professional gambler, who has become an outcast in the small California town of Poker Flats during the gold rush. His success as a gambler leads to a negative reputation and he is forced to leave the town along with a band of outcasts. A few conflicts arise, but none so severe as the blizzard that strikes them while they’re in the mountains. Oakhurst’s life of gambling success is long gone and all the bad luck he encounters leads him to suicide (Harte 674-684).
Did you know that authors use many different literary devices to tell a story? A literary device is a technique writers use to make their stories unique and interesting. Literary devices like simile, metaphor, suspense, personification, allusion, irony, foreshadowing, and imagery are used in lots of stories. In the short story ¨The Most Dangerous Game”, Richard Connell uses literary devices such as suspense and simile to help the reader gain a clear understanding of the story. In this essay, I will provide two examples of literary devices used throughout Richard Connell’s short story.
Mark Twain, the author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn uses several techniques to describe the natural world. Twain employs the use of figurative language – specifically personification and similes – to help create imagery. All of these things contribute to Twain’s description of the natural world. When Twain uses personification to describe nature, and compares it with the utilization of similes to describe how the inside world is affected by nature, it creates imagery that helps the reader understand the mood. These things help Twain achieve his purpose of describing the natural world for the reader.
Twain: In “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras Country” the tone of the narrator’s relationship began on the very first page. The narrator says that he has a “lurking suspicion” that Leonidas W. Smiley is made up and that Wheeler would “bore me to death with some exasperating reminiscence of him as long and as tedious as it should be useless to me” (Twain 1285). The narrator says that Simon Wheeler’s story telling is a “monotonous narrative” with no expressions (Twain 1285). Wheeler tells a Story about a man named Jim Smiley and uses figurative language to portray imagery throughout.
In Mark Twain’s famous Novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an exciting story that is told by a 13-year-old boy who ventures into a perilous expedition down the daunting Mississippi River on a puny wooden raft. The story's sensationalism sometimes makes Huck's journey seem unbelievable. Throughout his novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain uses several rhetorical strategies to portray the institution of slavery in America during the 1850s. To start off, Mark Twain published his book, the adventures of Huckleberry Finn, twenty years after the civil war.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain is a fictional novel about a boy named Tom Sawyer and his adventures with his friends during the 1840s in the state of Missouri. Tom and his friends have exciting experiences that Twain writes about in the book. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain uses foreshadowing, similes, and indirect characterization to ensure that the novel is action packed and full of enterprise. First, foreshadowing ensures that the book is full of excitement.
On their journey, they meet people from different walks of life, engage in a decades long feud, and even attend a circus. However, this novel is not all fun and games. Mark Twain blatantly demonstrates his beliefs in
Mark Twain, an 18th century humorist, was known for his critical and satirical writing. In one of his most famous essays, “ Fenimore Coopers Literary Offenses” Twain addresses Coopers inability to realistically develop a “situation” and his failure to effectively back up his stories in order for them to be more plausible. To dramatically convey his unimpressed and sarcastic attitude, he applies biting diction, metaphors and hypophora throughout this work . By continuously using biting diction, Twain develops a mocking tone towards Fenimore Cooper’s incapability to create even the simplest of storylines. In the title of the work a sarcastic tone is evident; the word choice is utilized to reinforce the argument stating how Coopers work is an offense to the world of literature.
The use of language in writing is a form of self-expression and is a way to reveal key things about narrators’ characters. The narrators in “The Notorious Jumping Frog” and “Baker's Bluejay Yarn” by Mark Twain, have a very specific style of language which reveals things about their characters. In “The Notorious Jumping Frog” the narrator’s name is Simon Wheeler, The story takes place in Calaveras County, a mining town in California. Wheeler is originally asked about a man by the name Leonidas W. Smiley, but Wheeler started talking a completely different man by the name of Jim Smiley, a man with a gambling problem, who once lived in town. In “Baker's Bluejay Yarn” the narrator's name is Jim Baker.
The short story “The Lottery” is written by Shirley Jackson. This story takes place in a small village where everybody knows each other. In this story all the villagers gather around town for their annual lottery. Everyone in the village is compelled to follow this tradition even if the outcome ends up with someone dying. In “The Lottery”, Shirley Jackson uses conflict, theme, and irony to develop this suspenseful short story.
“The Lottery” is a short story by Shirley Jackson. The story commences with a vivid description of the summer day in the town, giving us the idea that the day will be good. When the lottery begins, families begin to draw slips of paper from the black box. Finally, when Bill Hutchinson withdrew the slip of paper with the black dot, his wife Tessie starts yelling that it wasn 't fair. When the second drawing was held only among the Hutchinson’s family, Tessie gets the same piece of paper with the dot and is stoned to death.
The story “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson is a short story of horror and realism. On June 27th on a late summer morning, the villagers of a small New England village gatherd together in the town square to conduct their annual lottery. There is a black box on a stool and in the box there is pieces of paper in the box. Each person from a family get one paper from the black box even the children get a piece of paper and every stayed quiet and nervouse. Then Bill Hutchinson looked at the paper and notice that he got the black dot.
Twain is using foreshadowing to give you a look at the story's ending. Foreshadowing is a literary element that hints or
