In his essay, "Mark Twain's 'Jumping Frog': Towards an
American Heroic Ideal," Lawrence R. Smith contends that Mark Twain's story is satiric as
a deadpan trickster named Simon Wheeler makes fun of the pompous narrator who presumes
to call Wheeler "garrulous" at the onset of the story. As the narrator makes inquiries
about "a cherished companion of his boyhood named Leonidas W. Smiley," it becomes
apparent that Simon Wheeler, with his Western dialect and less pedantic turn of phrase,
satirizes the hypocrisy of the narrator who seeks the
preacher:
Parson Walker's wife laid very sick once, for a
good while, and it seemed as if they warn's going to save her; but one morning he come
in, and Smiley asked how she was, and he said she was considerable better thank the Lord
for his inftnit mercy and coming on so smart that, with the blessing of Providence,
she'd get well yet; and Smiley, before he thought, says, "Well, I'll risk two-
and-a-half that she don't, any
way."
Thus, argues Smith,
Twain sets up a contrast, not between the sophisticated and the vernacular voice, but
rather between the false and the true. Here, then, lies the irony. For, it is the
"monotonous narrative" of Wheeler which is effectively superior to the Eastern narrator
who is made a fool of by Wheeler's trick within a trick within another trick.
Ironically, then, the unsuspecting narrator departs tricked by the more clever Wheeler,
saying only
But, by your leave, I did not think that a
continuation of the history of the enterprising vagabond Jim Smiley would be likely to
afford me much information concerning the Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, and so I started
away.
It is Twain, then, as
narrator who becomes the butt of the joke. Speaking in stilted English, this narrator
represents the snobbery of the Eastern part of the United States in the 19th century, an
area with which Twain was well acquainted as he lived in
Conneticut.
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