Mark Twain's Development Of The Narrative And Vernacular Persona Technique

Abstract

Mark Twain was such a dominant personality that he literally commanded the full attention of his day with his activities. It has been said that he was the world's most well~known figure in his time. Twain's speaking tours in America and abroad helped him to create and maintain his image as a kind of representative American personality; in many ways he seemed the embodiment of the new man, the new spirit. After Twain's death in 1910, the force of his personality was so strong that it continued to overshadow his works. The early theories of Brooks' therefore were in the best traditions of biographical criticism and in the best traditions of Twain criticism; Brooks and others kept the emphasis on the man, Twain, rather than on his works. Brooks' idea, that Twain was a "divine amateur" who was thwarted by a psychological wound, is obviously in keeping with the forces of that time. What is not so obvious is tha.t Twain's supporters such as Devoto were, also, a part of this same tradition. Devoto defended Twain by trying to show from Twain's life that he was not psychologically "wounded." The whole period of the 1920's and 1930's was an unfortunate one for Twain criticism because it was dominated by Mark Twain with a concomitant de-emphasis of his works and their merits. In the late 1940's, a change began in Twain criticism. Lionel Trilling, among others, started to investigate, Huckleberry Finn, which had long been accepted as Twain's classic. These critics wrote of the work not the man. Since this time. investigations have slowly widened until they now embrace many of Twain's works. As these studies continue, Twain's reputation as a writer grows. Among his many accomplishments, Twain's critics have generally agreed on one; Twain was a great innovator in the use of the language. Scholars have noted especially his achievement with the vernacular persona in Huckleberry Finn. Huck Finn's voice is a great accomplishment in American fiction. However. only a few critics have recently studied Twain's earlier works in an attempt to trace the development of this technique. The best of these studies (especially the work of John C. Gerber) have left great areas still open to investigation. This study is an attempt to fill in some of those open areas.