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The Outcasts Of Poker Flat Compare And Contrast

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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). In the other story the narrator has received a letter from a friend asking him to look into someone named Leonidas W. Smiley. The narrator asks an old man, Simon Wheeler, what hen knows of the name and Wheeler goes off on a completely unrelated story about another …show more content…

The narrator in The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County does very little storytelling. He introduces us to Simon Wheeler by a barroom stove in an old tavern; then we spend the next three full pages listening to him (Twain 662-665). The narrator interrupts Wheeler and he ends our story (Twain 666). In The Outcasts of Poker Flat the narrator is outside the story and we do not know who it is. The narrator follows John Oakhurst from the beginning when he becomes an outcast (Harte 674) to the end when he dies (Harte 684). In both stories the narrators are outside and unrelated to the main story, but Twain’s story is told more from dialogue, immerged in another short story of the narrator and Simon Wheeler; in Harte’s story the narrator has no connection with the story except for the fact he is sharing

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At the beginning of The Outcasts of Poker Flat, the character John Oakhurst is introduced as a gambler, who has a calm tone and handsome face, with a compassionate, generous, honorable attitude, along with valuable leadership skills. Throughout the story, John Oakhurst shows qualities of being the strongest and then the weakest character. He shows his noble side when he returns money to Tom Simson, also known as “The Innocent”, after he won a gamble. Mr. Oakhurst considered it to be an unfair match due to Tom’s little experience with gambling and returned his money to Tom and told him to not gamble. However, the town of Poker Flat “a secret committee” gets rid of the improper citizens and Mr. Oakhurst was designated as one of them due to strong and lucky gambling skills.

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777 Words | 4 Pages

Harte’s story takes place during November of 1850 (Harte 674) and Twains story was somewhere between the winter of 1840 and 1850 (Twain 663). Both towns were mining towns during the California gold rush. They were small towns in which would look somewhat like the Wild West. People would come from all over in the hopes of finding gold and getting rich quick. One small difference between the stories is in Twains story “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” is that it is in a “decayed mining camp” (Twain 662), but in Harte’s story it is referred to as “a town of all improper persons”.

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In the book The Poisonwood Bible story telling is explained as something that is passed on from one person to the next. Stories can be told in many different ways, and there are always multiple sides. Within this book specifically the author, Kingsolver, is trying to tell the story of the view of an oppressed female in the 1960’s. The women are able to give a different outlook on life, compared to what a character like Nathan. Communication is an important factor in storytelling and is the center of all life.

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875 Words | 4 Pages

In “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”, the dialect establishes the tone between the narrator and Wheeler by having Wheeler tell a series of stories about a betting man named Smiley. The narrator makes a point to emphasize that Wheeler is a just average person and that he has little interest in interviewing him about a likely mad up story about a man named Smiley. This results in the tone of the story being nonchalant. For example, “…it would remind him of his infamous Jim Smiley, and he would got to work and bore me to death with some exasperating reminiscence of him as long and tedious as it should be useless to me. I that was the design, it succeeded.”

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Mark Twain and Frederick Douglass both have interesting ways of writing. There are similarities and differences in their writing. They each have their own personal preference toward their style, tone, and perspective. Each story was a remembrance of boyhood written in first person. As evident, Twain’s story takes place as a boy in a town on the Mississippi River.

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Twain’s Work incorporates two different perspectives to reveal the life of Jim Smiley through the narrator. Jim Smiley was always known as a gambler. Correspondingly,

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William Ecenbarger 's Pennsylvania Stories—Well Told, was reviewed in the June 21 issue of the Press Enterprise. The review read, "Reading the stories is like listening to your favorite quirky friend. The language rolls like a perfectly poured beer into a glass, gleaming gold and with just the right amount of froth."

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763 Words | 4 Pages

Realism is literature that represents actual life, the author Bret Harte tries to stay as close to the truth as possible when writing. Authors like him write truthfully and objectively about ordinary characters and their ordinary situations. In Harte’s “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” he represents realism through archetypes and local colour. The short story is set in 1850 in a California mining town during the Gold Rush.

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Have you ever realized how oppression leads to conformity? In the stories “The Outcast of Poker Flat” by Bret Harte and “My bondage and my freedom” by Frederick Douglass, the relationship between societal oppression and conformity is clearly seen. Throughout these stories the authors used the rhetorical strategy, ethos, to thoroughly represent the Conformity that has been demonstrated. Addiction to that the characters in these stories demonstrate how oppression in society leads to conformity The societal message that oppression leads to conformity is shown by the use of ethos in “My bondage and my freedom”.

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The folktale The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County written by the astounding Mark Twain brought him world wide attention because of his significant use of humor. The folktale contains wisdom and deep as the tone of the story. In the frame story Jim Smiley gambles and finally loses the bet to a “feller” who kills Smiley’s frog. Simon narrates “So he sat there a good while thinkin and thinkin to hisself, and then he got the frog out and prized his mouth open and look a teaspoon and filled him full of quail pretty near up to his chin” this exposes the unnamed man who cheats to win against smiley who is usually lucky.

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305 Words | 2 Pages

In the folktale “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” by Mark Twain, a nameless foreigner from the east of the United States travels to the west to visit Simon Wheeler. The folktale is told in a frame narrative. Both the narrator and Wheeler, being from different parts of the United States, vocalize in a disparate manner. Twain uses clever and colloquial vernacular to compare and contrast the narrator and Wheeler; by doing this, Twain elicits a stronger attitude from the reader.

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192 Words | 1 Pages

“ The Celebrated Jumping Frog Of Calaveras County “ Mark Twain, an American writer, entrepreneur and publisher, presents a short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog Of Calaveras County.” Old Simon Wheeler tells the narrator a mirthful story of Jim Smiley and his “trained frog. ”A well known gambler, Jim was cheated one day when a stranger fed his frog buckshot and made him lose a bet. Twain illuminates a tone that is exaggerated and humorous for a light hearted folktale that provides a sense of entertainment.

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775 Words | 4 Pages

"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.

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1008 Words | 5 Pages

The scene then changes to the narrator’s childhood, a lonely one at it. “I lay on the bed and lost myself in stories,” he says, “I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.” The main narrative starts as he recalls a

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192 Words | 1 Pages

I selected Mark Twain’s story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (Twain, 1867). I decided to write this particular story because of two reasons: First, “[Mark Twain] rendered the story lively and enjoyable to read” (Pohl, 2017); Second, I am familiar another work of Mark Twain. My concept of the story is same to Mr. Pohl’s concept of the story. The story is about Jim Smiley, a calculated risk taker who gets his fix from betting.

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