Analysis Of Mark Twain's 'The Prince And The Pauper'

THE BROKENHEARTED OF THE GILDED AGE (where the gold was only on the surface)

-Twain, Crane, and Dreiser-

Humoristic Pesimism – Ever Changing, Barely Deep For Safe Passage (mark twain)

“Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”

Human kaleidoscope – poor boy, adventurer, journalist, scholar, millionaire - ever changing comic genious, tackled concepts of race, territory, language, literature,politics, gender, … Wild, reckless boy, grew up on the west bank of Mississippi River, always sought that sincereness, freedom and independence. But, he was setting himself for a fall – he became an artist crushed by the American environment. Typically American – self-educated in the hard school of life – his life was constant

The Prince and the Pauper (1881) revisited the notion of disparity between rich and poor. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) Twain extends the concept of what it meant to be civilized, while expressing his own views on patritism: “You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its ofce-holders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wearout . . . (chapter 13).” Revisiting the concept of race in Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), Twain reaches the conclusion that it is primarily a social and cultural idea (artificiality of the notion). Race – trapped by the social, political, historical context – determined individual’s sociopolitical status. Twain ridiculed the South’s customs and legal system : “To all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fi fteen parts and made her a negro. She was a slave, and saleable as such.Her child was thirty-one parts white, and he, too, was a slave and, by a fi ction of law and custom, a negro. (Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson [1894] 63 – 64)”. Despite his condemnations of the system, corrosive effects of this environment had already taken place, and it was too late to repair the damage that was already been done. The final, itentionally posthumous work, The Mysterious Stranger (1916) revealed Twains ultimate, profound despair. From a godlike perspective, he exposes the human greed. He regards free will as an illusion, and sees human nation as a machine: “I see no great difference between a man and a watch, except that a man is conscious and a watch is not” – which adds even more weight to the human