25 pages • 50 minutes read
Mark TwainThe Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1865A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Jim Smiley
Jim Smiley is an inveterate gambler during California’s Gold Rush days whom Simon Wheeler recalls in excruciating detail. Smiley will bet on anything, to the point where he irritates people, but he is unbothered and obsessed with making wagers. To ingratiate himself with a bettor, Smiley will gladly switch sides on a bet; somehow, he wins anyway. This is not because he is a con artist; instead, it is due to his enthusiastic understanding of all the possibilities—or so claims Simon Wheeler.
Part of the fun of the Jim Smiley story is the possibility that he really is the Leonidas Smiley sought by the Narrator but living under a slightly different name or a nickname. It helps that this Smiley displays a cheerful innocence about others, something that might make sense in a gambler if he were formerly a parson. This lingering possibility helps keep the Narrator, and the reader, enthralled by Wheeler’s depiction of Smiley’s absurd games of chance. In an early version of the story, Smiley’s name was changed to Greeley—a play on “greedy”—but Twain later changed it back to Smiley, a moniker that evokes the character’s innocent friendliness.
Narrator
The Narrator stands in for both the author and the reader at times, speaking in first person and complaining that his experience at Angel’s Camp was an outrageous effrontery by a “garrulous” bartender with a “long and tedious” story (Paragraph 1). He relates Simon Wheeler’s elaborate description of Jim Smiley in Wheeler’s vernacular accent, while his own comments exhibit the standardized English grammar and pronunciation of a well-educated Easterner. He thus contrasts himself with a local resident whom he considers simple, all the while clueless to the fact that the local he disdains has put one over on him. The reader experiences the story alongside the Narrator, who eventually becomes the butt of a joke played by his friend, and possibly Twain as well.
Simon Wheeler
Aging, bald-headed bartender Simon Wheeler seems innocent and friendly, even as his name suggests otherwise, “Wheeler” evoking the term “wheeler-dealer.” He makes an apparently earnest, if long-winded, attempt to inform the Narrator about a man with a name similar to the one he seeks. Simon Wheeler’s monotonous delivery and run-on description of Jim Smiley test the visitor’s patience, which is Simon’s intent, as he is in fact playing an elaborate trick on the Narrator with his lengthy fable. Wheeler describes Smiley as an obsessive gambler; he might as well be describing his own obsession with storytelling. Simon Wheeler is a flat character, meaning he is relatively simple and does not change over the course of the story. Like the Narrator, Simon functions as part of the framework of the joke at the heart of the story, and the method by which Smiley’s adventures are told.
Related Titles
By Mark Twain
