25 pages • 50 minutes read
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
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Themes
The Sophisticated Fool
The “Jumping Frog” story revolves around a somewhat snobbish Narrator’s search for a long-lost friend of a friend, and the man’s disdain for the ridiculous stories he hears. He believes his informant is an old fool, but in fact the informant is playing a sophisticated joke on him. The Narrator, a well-educated American from the East Coast, comes to bartender Simon Wheeler seeking information about Leonidas W. Smiley. To his dismay, the Narrator is treated to an elaborate, endless story about a Jim Smiley, a gambler who will bet on anything. The Narrator makes it clear that he has little respect for Wheeler, whom he regards as a buffoon with “an expression of winning gentleness and simplicity upon his tranquil countenance” (Paragraph 2). As evidence of Wheeler’s lack of smarts, the Narrator reports the old man’s tale in its entirety, complete with slang and speech patterns that, to the Narrator, demonstrate Wheeler’s lack of education and sophistication. The Narrator believes his friend put him up to the chore simply to trick him into witnessing one of the bartender’s moronic, unhelpful monologues.
What the Narrator misses completely is that the bartender has neatly turned the tables on his self-important visitor, using the guise of a simple man to lead the Narrator around by the nose, so to speak, with his fake-earnest fable. The story serves a warning to its readers: A person must be careful about whom they assume themselves to be, because people they underestimate may, in turn, surprise them. This same dynamic plays out with Jim Smiley, who is both underestimated by others and underestimates his own opponent in the frog-jumping competition. These sophisticated fools—the Narrator, Wheeler, and Jim—embody Twain’s game of playing with the reader’s expectations. Each character subverts expectations, the Narrator by being taken in by Simon, Simon by proving wilier than he seems, and Jim Smiley by transcending his silliness with real luck and skill before losing at his own game.
By setting the story in a Gold Rush town and incorporating the vernacular of the American West, Twain draws similar humor from his caricature of Wild West archetypes. The American frontier, considered less civilized by many Eastern Americans at the time, offered the potential for a new kind of logic and new social dynamics outside the boundaries of established East Coast society. Twain participates in American myth making, satirizing both American high society and the Gold Rush towns and speculators that captured American imaginations at the time. In Twain’s humorous context, what seems ridiculous may contain wisdom, and what seems fashionable may prove ridiculous.
How to Tell a Tall Tale
Twain playfully makes an argument for how to tell tall tales in “The Celebrated Jumping Frog.” A good yarn, especially an absurd one, requires several features if it is to succeed as entertainment. Jumping Frog sets forth those features almost as if it were a classroom exercise in fabulist storytelling. The author sets out to play a joke his readers; he warns them that he is about to do so, and then, like a magician, performs his verbal tricks and fools them anyway.
First, the Narrator explains that he will relate information provided to him by another person. This is a standard approach taken by tellers of tall tales. It puts the information at some remove, which allows the teller to maintain an air of innocence or plausible deniability regarding the fabulous tale to be told. The Narrator then suggests that the information he received might have been a false lead and a wild goose chase.
Next, the Narrator presents his informant, Simon Wheeler, an elderly bartender who tries to answer the Narrator’s question about a missing gentleman named Smiley, but his response drags on and on, simultaneously boring the Narrator and lulling him into an incautious state of mind. Wheeler tells of an obsessive gambler who will bet on anything. In support of this, Wheeler describes, in elaborate detail, several of Smiley’s more notable bets that end in surprising ways. This, the author implies, is how a good tall tale becomes believable: The sheer amount of intricate information serves to suggest that the stories are true. Still, the rapid-fire way in which the incidents are described acts as yet another hint provided by the author: A clever reader can sense that Wheeler has a talent for making things up as he talks.
The phrase “tall tale” refers to a story, often related orally, that exaggerates the truth while presenting itself as fact. Each event in Smiley’s betting life, no matter how unlikely, surprising, or silly the outcome, remains just barely plausible. Much as piling on detail adds realism, tossing in impossibilities will break the listener’s suspension of disbelief; this must be avoided at all costs. The Narrator finally concludes that he has been tricked—not so much by Wheeler, whom the Narrator regards as a fool, but by the Narrator’s friend, who sent him to the garrulous bartender. In fact, the perceptive reader will realize that the Narrator has been fooled twice, once by his friend and once by Wheeler, who played the fool to attract the Narrator’s attention.
By the end of the story, it is unclear exactly who is telling the truth and who is lying. In this way, the author warns readers that they, too, may have been tricked. “The Celebrated Jumping Frog” thus serves as a kind of manual on how to tell a tall tale, simultaneously teaching readers how to tell when someone is stretching the truth.
Common Sense Versus Deceit
Related to Twain’s exploration of tall-tales and truth in storytelling, Jim Smiley’s adventures emphasize the perils of attempting to win through deceit. Wheeler describes Jim Smiley as a relentless gambler who will bet on absolutely anything, from the behavior of a bug to the survival of a sickroom spouse. To win these bets, Smiley manipulates the odds in his favor, switching sides or training animals without his opponent’s knowledge. Smiley is so confident in his abilities and so eager to make bets that he becomes incautious, letting his prized frog out of his sight for an extended period while he searches for another frog for his opponent. Of course, the Stranger finds a way to undo Smiley’s advantage, and Smiley loses an expensive wager. By showing Smiley being beaten at his own game, Twain humorously suggests that all tricksters ultimately meet the same fate.
In the story, characters become vulnerable to deceit because they are too trusting of the motives of others. The Narrator believes his friend sends him to Simon Wheeler in good faith, Simon’s early opponents assume that the wagers he makes are fair, and Simon himself assumes that the Stranger will honorably wait for his return. In each case, common sense and healthy suspicion could have prevented the deception. As is often the case in humor, Twain typically allows the seemingly less sophisticated character to triumph over his more educated, self-important characters. Notably, Smiley loses twice in the story due to overconfidence: first in his dogfights when an opponent absurdly circumvents his strategy, and second when the Stranger takes advantage of Smiley’s fervor to hustle a new mark. Smiley does not lose to complicated maneuvers or elaborate schemes, but is bested by incredibly simple, silly tactics. His dogfighting opponent presents a dog with no legs to be pinned, and the Stranger weighs down Smiley’s frog while he is not looking. Sure of his own success, Smiley becomes the same kind of person he aims to trick: too arrogant to recognize his own weaknesses. Similarly, it is the Narrator’s desire to be polite that facilitates Simon’s ability to hold him hostage to his tale; only when the Narrator rejects the social consequences of rudely fleeing his host is he able to escape. This playful role-reversal and class dynamic appears frequently in Twain’s writing, as he celebrated common sense and romanticized rural life many times throughout his career.
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By Mark Twain
