The Mark Twain Thesis :: essays research papers

Mark Twain To look at that person on the honor role, who's the best athlete, has the newest car, and gets all the ladies. Or the person in art class who continually produces the best art work and ruins the grade curve for the rest of us. Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example. Throughout his life Mark Twain continued to produce masterpiece writing leaving no good example un-battered. A man who gets his dream job, and is despised by the whole town of just dreamers. A person who's convictions are stronger than his flesh. And a seemingly harmless man, who tells the story as it should be told and comes under the utter annoyance of the narrator. Imperfect characterization played an , obvious, major role in his writings proving that few things annoyed him more than a good example. The pose that Twain takes to his characters that seem to be striving for excellence is quite unique. In an excerpt from Life On The Mississippi Twain tells us of a man with a dream. As imperfection has it this man's dream did not come true. But his friend's similar dream , however, did. The narrator tells us through a blanket of jealousy how this man was perpetually annoying, and how, 'there was nothing generous about this fellow and his greatness.'; Like many of Twain's writings this excerpt shows us a man with convictions as he looks at a seemingly good example and puts it under a different light. Convictions that shine through in what could quite possibly be a realistic situation (in Twain's accounts of them) shimmer with imperfection. In a part of Roughing It Twain brings us to a camp of three men. Under the inclination that they are all about to die, these men start to ponder what they could have done with the rest of their lives. They all end up making promises to themselves that they fully believe they will not have to keep. Promises of, 'reform'; and 'examples to the rising generation.'; In what would seem to be a surreal end to a story of repenters continues on. These men find themselves in a comical situation and end up surviving. So what happens to the promises they never gave a thought to having to keep but for the few moments it takes a man to freeze to death in the dead cold of winter?