SOURCE: "The Deadpan on Simon Wheeler," in Southwest Review, Vol. 4, No. 3, Summer, 1956, pp. 270-77.

In the following essay, Schmidt investigates Twain's use of comic gravity in Simon Wheeler's narration of the frog story.

In the encounter between Mark Twain and Simon Wheeler which frames the story of "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" we are, apparently, expected to agree with the narrator, Mark Twain, that the "good natured, garrulous" miner is a comic butt. Wheeler tells his story, according to Mark Twain, like a simpleton:

He never smiled, he never frowned, he never changed his voice from the gentle-flowing key to which he tuned his initial sentence, he never betrayed the slightest suspicion of enthusiasm; but all through the interminable narrative there ran a vein of impressive earnestness and sincerity . . .

His blank seriousness, his vernacular language, and the seeming naïveté with which his story personifies the...