The Mark Twain Thesis

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... [continues]

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