Humorous Irony In Mark Twain's Travel Books

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835– April 21, 1910), better known as Mark Twain, is an American writer, journalist and humorist. He is not only the nation's first literary celebrity, and the most famous American writer of his period, and is also celebrated as the most influential literary figures in America, and throughout the world. "Mark Twain", the pen name, born in the Nevada Territory in 1863 of Sam Clemens' ambitions, was nurtured by publishers, editors and other promoters and have over two centuries became a kind of mythic hero. Although he is widely known as one of the most successful American writers, Mark Twain is truly a key figure of cultural connections and exchanges in his period. Actually, in his early career, his was faster and better received and celebrated abroad, especially in European countries than in his native country.It is Mark Twain who introduced colloquial speech into American novel-writing, most noted in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In Green Hills of Africa, Ernest Hemingway wrote: "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn..."(Hemingway, 1935:22) For more than half of century, Mark Twain has been lauded as"the father of American literature". Twain's language, the various comic skills in his writing—satire, irony, wild exaggeration, mocking maxims and funny quips have all contributed to the title gave by his contemporaries as the"greatest American humorist of his age". Mark Twain's fame in literature comes first and foremost because he is very funny, in other words, Twain has been remembered by his readers for his humor, and the usage of humor and irony is best illustrated in his travel books. (Messent, 2008: 23)Whenever or wherever Mark Twain had been mentioned, the comic effect and the trait of humor were always mentioned together with him. Humor is inseparable from Mark Twain's writing, especially his adventure and travel books. Mark Twain's humor stood out from him no matter where he was and how he was supposed to behave. Either it is a serious academic speech to the students, or a political report, Mark Twain was always able to bring laughter to his audience and readers. In a word, he employed his humor inexhaustibly whenever and however he could, or rather, his humor was always ready to come out of Mark Twain beyond everyone's expectation.Twain's humor is best illustrated in his travel books, starting with the publication of his first travel book Innocents Abroad. For readers of the late nineteenth century, Mark Twain was first and foremost a travel writer, rather than a novelist. As an author, he earned the greatest literary fame not by his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer but as the narrator of his first travel book, his best-seller travel and the most popular work of his. In his life, Mark Twain published five travel books: Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), A Tramp Abroad (1880), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and Following the Equator (1897). (Stephen, 2004: 68)In his autobiography, Mark Twain has mentioned that travel literature can not do without the use of humor, and in his way, it is the humorous irony, since any travel novels is full of all kinds of characters; he added that a travel novel will turn into a boring report if there is not comic techniques in it. (Twian, 1900: 301).The Innocents Abroad chronicles Twain's cruise on Quaker City (former a retired civil war ship USS Quaker City) through Europe and the Holy Land with a group of religious pilgrims in 1867. Twain used a variety of comic skills to tell the stories of the pilgrims on board as the first group of religious tourists in European continent, in order to reveal the fact that most of the American people had been blindly worshiping the Holy Land without any knowledge of it; as a matter of fact, the Old World is not necessarily better than the newly established United States.Roughing It is a book of semi-autobiographical travel literature, as a prequel to his first book Innocents Abroad. It tells of Twain's adventures in the Wild West when he stayed with his brother Orion in Nevada. In this book, readers can see many examples of Mark Twain's rough-hewn humor which became a staple of his writing in his later works. With the use of humorous irony, Twain told the real life of the prospectors in the frontier who were dreaming of becoming a millionaire overnight.Life on the Mississippi is a memoir by Mark Twain remembering his days as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River before and after the American Civil War. In an ironical way, Mark Twain detailed the anecdotes of his training as a steamboat pilot and described the challenging life working and living along the ever-changing Mississippi River. Twain ridiculed the big change of the River, as more industry and business grew, and observed how greed, dishonesty, tragedy and bad architecture had taken over the life of people who resided along it; the intonation of this book is more critical than the other two travel books of his, however, Life on the Mississippi is illustrating Mark Twain's humorous irony in the same way, if not more, as in the previous two.This paper attempts to explore the Mark Twain myth by focusing on his comic techniques, mainly about his humorous irony in three of his major travel books-- Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, and Life on the Mississippi, and also chronicles the cultural background and introduction about Sam Clemens'early life before he really entered into the writing world.