SOURCE: "The Californian: The Jumping Frog," in The Literary Apprenticeship of Mark Twain, with Selections from His Apprentice Writing, University of Illinois Press, 1950, pp. 120-29.
In the first important scholarly discussion of the jumping frog story, Branch examines Simon Wheeler's narrative method and asserts that there are three levels of reality in the story—the commonsense world, the realm of oddity, and the realm of the fantastic—as represented by the figures of the genteel narrator, Simon Wheeler, and Jim Smiley.
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