The Big Bear of Arkansas & The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County :The Process of Putting Oral Tales into a Literary Form

Takumaro Izumi

Thomas Bangs Thorpe and Mark Twain both tried to write down tall tales spoken in a frontier community, adopting the frame construction in which a writer-narrator introduces a yokel and lets him spin his tall tales. This is one of the Southwestern traditions.

In Thorpe’s The Big Bear of Arkansas, a writer-narrator who looks like a condescending self-controlled gentleman, intervenes in the tale of a yokel, Jim Doggett, and translates some of Jim’s spoken words into his class’s written words. Thus what has been transcribed in Jim Doggett’s own story is not the exact record of his spoken yarn. This intervention is partly a result of the writer-narrator’s direct contact with the yokel and his tall tales.

Twain similarly applies to The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County the frame construction in which a yokel, Wheeler, initiates a stranger into a Western community by spinning a rambling and endless yarn and causing him to be dismayed and defeated, which used to be the original purpose of tall tales. In this narration, Wheeler tells the tall tale of Jim Smiley, another yokel, and his absurd practice of betting, especially on his frog. As a writer-narrator can not intervene in Wheeler’s story of Jim, the detailed description sounds like a real record of an oral tale.