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Notorious Jumping Frog

Decent Essays

1. The educational aspect portrayed in this text “The Notorious Jumping Frog”, was made very clear. Mark Twain brilliantly allowed the readers to see a difference between Easterners and Westerners through educated and uneducated diction. The narrator’s tone and choice of words used at the beginning of the text, revealed to me that he has academia background. The narrator stated, “I called on good natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler…” (Twain 121). When using the word garrulous, when in terms simply means chatty, right away this led me to think the narrator’s vocabulary was extensive. The narrator also carried a certain persona about himself, a persona of patience and self-control, being that he sat and listened to the very chatty Simon Wheeler’s without interrupting. …show more content…

Unlike the narrator, Simon Wheeler’s dialect and description of Jim Smiley was not so much formal. He used westernized slang words such as ‘feller’ and ‘thish-er’ when telling the story of Jimmy Smiley to the narrator (Twain 123). Although not specifically stated, Smiley seemed to have come from a background where survival by any means possible was the motto for life. Any means possible, meaning doing bizarre things that to another would seem classless. Mark Twain depicted Smiley as a man simply trying to make best out of life. It was perceived that formal education was not prevalent in his surroundings and street hustling was the way of life, perhaps passed on from previous generations. Overall, Twain was able to show the readers a distinct difference between Easternized and Westernized

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