"The Luck of Roaring Camp" is a poignant short story written by Bret Harte, nineteenth-century master of the genre. In this realism tale set during the Californian gold rush era, the author successfully depicts how humanity can be concealed within a squalid and crude world. In it, a new-born child has a civilizing influence on men in more than one way: the tragedy of his birth brings the men together; he has the power to assemble them as a society, a culture. Secondly, the men become more polite, cordial towards one another. Thirdly, they have rites like all societies, giving a meaning to all lives in the camp. At the beginning of the story, the camp is introduced as a rude, ruthless, and lawless place where every man only thinks about himself. All the characters are clichés, stereotypes of humanity; they are brutes, whose attention would not be attracted even by a fight to death, as it was so ordinary. In the first paragraph …show more content…
Whether it is the “rude sepulture” for the mother’s funeral, the naming of the infant “call him Luck and start him fair”, his feeding, the idea of adoption quickly rejected because “them fellows at Red Dog would swap it”, and the baptism that starts quite satirically but ends up being rather serious and when the name of God is pronounced “otherwise than profanity”, life in Roaring Camp is definitively different from what it used to be. The irreverence exposed sometimes is quickly turned into an apology to the advantage of the baby, whether when it is time to choose his name or baptize him: “It’s better (…) to take a fresh deal all round.” Even at the end, when they are looking for their baby after he has disappeared in the flood, his body is saved by Kentuck, himself “cruelly crushed and bruised” but not giving up their Luck. Even dead, the baby is their hope in the afterlife as Kentuck says “he’s a taking me with