ABSTRACT
Twain’s voice—the persona—focuses the literary comedy. The 1860s was a time for experimentation with this voice in a variety of subjects—burlesques, travel narratives, semiserious reporting—and he never really stopped developing, as his travel narratives show. Twain advanced literary comedy significantly by using the flexibility of his voice to blend plot and author, playing humor against the dramatization of events. The literary comedian thus came to occupy a place inside the novel by virtue of his characteristic attitude toward social and political events. The recording of Pap’s “call this a gov’ment” speech in Huck’s voice is a natural out-growth of this management of tone, the technique which originates in the burlesques of the 1860 period. Twain’s letters to the Alta California and a series of letters for the Missouri Democrat in 1866 and 1867 give particularly clear revelations of Twain’s experiments in such forms. The resolution which he achieved shapes his novels.
