Mark Twain'S Use of the Comic Pose

Abstract

Mark twain's range in point of view is readily apparent in those works in which he uses fictional narrators. To reassure oneself on this point it is necessary only to recall some of his more famous narrators: Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, Huckleberry Finn, Hank Morgan, Sieur Louis de Conte, King Leopold, and Captain Ben Stormfield, not to mention Adam, Eve, a horse, and a dog. What is not so readily apparent, however, is that an analogous range in point of view exists in those works narrated not by personae but by “Mark Twain”—such works as the travel letters and books, “Old Times on the Mississippi,” “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” and the bulk of the short newspaper and magazine sketches. In some of these Twain played it straight; that is, he employed in them a point of view that was essentially his own. In others he assumed a pose, a point of view other than his own. And in still others, especially in the longer works, he alternated between real and assumed points of view. My concern in this essay is with the nature and range of these assumed points of view.