Monday, September 17, 2007

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County - Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)

After reading Mark Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”, I immediately equated the narrator with myself and the character of Simon Wheeler with my grandparents. In the first paragraph of the story, the narrator states that Simon Wheeler would prove to “go to work and bore me to death with some exasperating reminiscence of him as long and as tedious as it should be useless to me”. (Twain 272). There are many times when my grandparents find themselves launching into stories of their past, some of which are interesting and others which tend to irritate me simply because they seem to have no point. The narrator in Twain’s story seems to feel the same way about Simon Wheeler’s tangent on Jim Smiley, a man whose story really serves no purpose to the narrator. However, the more I thought about this story, the more I felt that the narrator should not have dismissed Wheeler’s story, no matter how irrelevant it was to him. When I find myself trying to drown out the sounds of my grandparent’s stories, I often end up feeling guilty. Although these stories may not be relevant to my life, they are part of my grandparent’s history and I should take all of them in. My grandparents find great joy in relating their stories to me because they want me to know about their lives so that I can keep their memory alive and understand their past. By the end of “Jumping Frog”, I found myself disappointed in the narrator; although Wheeler’s story was not pertinent to the man he was looking for, Simon Wheeler most likely found enjoyment in having an audience to express Jim Smiley’s story to. Although this story is meant to be a comedy, I actually found it to be kind of sad because it made me realize how younger generations often dismiss older generations when instead we should be listening; their stories are what makes up history and we should be more than happy to listen.

1 comment:

Laura Nicosia said...

I like how you explained your immediate sympathies with the narrator! Yes. The younger generations do sometimes dismiss the older. It IS a sad thing. :-(