The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County Mind Map

1. Work Cited Page

1.1. http://www.shmoop.com/celebrated-jumping-frog-calaveras/writing-style.html

2. Point of View

2.1. First Person

2.2. Through a frame narrative, the narrator (clearly an educated man from the East) presents the story of Jim Smiley, told in Simon Wheeler’s uneducated dialect. This is the main device that Twain uses to present the contrast between East and West: educated vs. uneducated, refined vs. coarse.

3. The Author's Tone and Diction

3.1. Disparaging, disbelieving

3.2. Though the content suggests the opposite of the tone, the attitude of the narrator toward the subject matter is one of disbelief that his time has been wasted in such a way. He’s annoyed that he has had to listen to such a stupid tale (about Dan'l Webster) from a man who seems to take it so seriously. His effort to reproduce Wheeler’s ungrammatical dialect feels slightly mocking.

4. The Setting

4.1. Angel's Camp is a gold mining community in the mid-19th century that the narrator claims to have visited to find Simon Wheeler. Like any mining town in the West, it was populated primarily by men, many of them looking for their fortune. As something of a frontier town, it would probably seem to be full of loud, uncouth, and uneducated people compared to the more genteel East.

5. Theme

5.1. Though Jim Smiley appears to be extraordinarily lucky, it is partly through his cunning and cleverness that he is able to win bets. He is finally outsmarted by a stranger, who beats him through cheating. Nonetheless, the story poses a moral distinction between honest and dishonest cleverness. It also shows that you don’t necessarily have to be educated and well spoken to be clever, nor is a good education a defense against getting fooled.

6. A Quote That Gets To The Heart of The Story

6.1. I have a lurking suspicion that Leonidas W. Smiley is a myth; that my friend never knew such a personage; and that he only conjectured that, if I asked old Wheeler about him, it would remind him of his infamous Jim Smiley, and he would go to work and bore me nearly to death with some infernal reminiscence of him as long and tedious as it should be useless to me. If that was the design, it certainly succeeded. (Para 1)

7. A One-Sentence Summary

7.1. A man from the East comes to a western mining town. At the request of a friend, the narrator speaks with Simon Wheeler in order to ask after a man named Leonidas W. Smiley. Instead of giving the narrator the information that he asks for, Wheeler launches into a tall tale about a man named Jim Smiley. The story goes something like this: Jim Smiley was a man who would bet on anything. He turned a frog into a pet and bet a stranger that his frog, Dan’l Webster, could jump higher than any other frog. While Smiley wasn't looking, the stranger filled Dan’l Webster with quail shot, and Smiley lost the bet. Before he could figure out what happened, the stranger disappeared with the $40 he won by cheating. Sick of the long-winded tale about Jim Smiley and his frog, the narrator tries to escape from Wheeler before he launches into another story. The narrator realizes that his friend probably intended for him to suffer through Wheeler's tedious tale.

8. The Main Characters

8.1. JIM SMILEY

8.2. THE STRANGER

8.3. SIMON WHEELER

8.4. THE NARRATOR

8.5. DAN’L WEBSTER

8.6. ANDREW JACKSON

9. Main Idea

9.1. The story was also published as "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" and "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog." All three are typical "tall tale" titles, suggesting nothing more than a myth about some amazing frog. The three titles fail to hint at the political undertones in the story, which can be found in the name of the feisty dog Andrew Jackson and the amazing frog named Dan’l Webster, who was cheated from winning by a wily stranger who fills him with quail shot so that he can’t move.

9.2. Though the narrator stops Wheeler from continuing his tall tale at the very end of the story, and assumes that his quest was fruitless, it’s possible that he’s just been had, as he suggests in the introduction. Perhaps his friend never intended for the narrator to learn about the Reverend Leonidas W. Smiley but, instead, to realize that as rusty and rough as these westerners are, they know and appreciate street smarts – and sometimes street smarts are more important than a fine education.