Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Proseminar: „CrossCultural Impressions – 
Germans in America, Americans in Germany“
Summer Semester 2005

Mark Twain as a Fictional Persona in “A Tramp Abroad”

September 5, 2005

by

Daniela Deubler

Englisch, Geographie, Spanisch (LA Gym)
2nd Semester

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION  3

2. NARRATOR IN A TRAMP ABROAD  3
2.1. DESCRIPTION OF THE NARRATOR  4
2.2. ACQUAINTANCES OF THE NARRATOR  5

3. PUBLICITY  6
3.1. PUBLIC IMAGE  6
3.2. MARKETING  8

4. A TRAMP ABROAD  9
4.1. FICTIONALIZATION  9
4.2. THEMES  10
4.3. INFLUENCE ON THE READER  11

5. CONCLUSION  12

6. BIBLIOGRAPHY  14

1. Introduction

Mark Twain has been and still is one of the most famous authors of 19th century America. His fame and reputation went far over the borders of the United States. Nevertheless, there has always been one fact that has been striking about Mark Twain: the riddle of his identity.

“The fictional Mark Twain is no singular thing but rather a varied cast of characters”¹. In the following work we are going to find out more about the fictional Mark Twain of A Tramp Abroad.

Samuel Clemens has always been money-orientated and was therefore looking for possibilities on how to influence his readers, how to influence the public in general and how to commercialize his book to make the most money out of it. The construction of his fictional persona will be analysed in the following work and we are also going to find out whether the creation of the fictional persona for his book who shows parallels and contrasts to Samuel Clemens helped him to influence his readership. We will examine how far the fictional character has an impact on the public and the commercilization of the book, for all of those three facts are linked together.

2. Narrator in A Tramp Abroad

A Tramp Abroad is told from the camera-eye perspective of a first person narrator. The way the narrator describes himself and the things he sees and undertakes let the reader guess that the narrative deals with an alter-ego of the author Samuel Langhorne Clemens (xxix).² Throughout the book one can find many parallels and contrasts between the narrator – otherwise called the fictional persona - and the author of the book.

2.1. Description of the narrator

The narrator Mark Twain describes himself as an adventurous, appreciated and almost faultless “innocent” hero on his way to discover the Old World. Right at the beginning of the first chapter he is thinking “that it had been many years since the world had been afforded the spectacle of a man adventurous enough to undertake a journey through Europe on foot” (3) and it instantly comes to his mind that he is “a person fitted to furnish to mankind this spectacle” (3). Mark Twain has obviously a very high opinion of himself, another example of this is the fact that he wants to go to Heidelberg by raft while everyone else is frightened, he takes the responsibility all upon himself and takes off on this adventure (79).

Twain is a man who is always on the search for appreciation, admiration and wants to be everybody’s hero. Whether he is “the only man who had been hurt in a French duel in forty years” (46) and therefore of great interest or whether it is just the simple fact that his garb is admired by other tourists (62). However, he does not miss one opportunity telling the reader how much he is admired and therefore the number of accounts of him receiving admiration and being the focus of interest is endless. With this not enough, he outdoes himself with the imaginative ascent of the Riffelberg which is of course “the most imposing expedition” (270) that “had ever been seen in the Alps” (271). How much Twain exaggerates to become the center of attention can be judged by the fact that he is actually wearing his evening dress on ascending the Riffelberg instead of his climbing gear.

Another one of his character traits is that he seems to be very observant. In his book Following the Equator he notices something about a bird whose description also fits the narrator in A Tramp Abroad : “Nothing escapes him; he notices everything that happens”.³

[....]

1 Forrest Robinson, “Mark Twain, 1835-1910: A Brief Biography.” A Historical Guide to Mark Twain. Ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Oxford: OUP, 2002) 15.

2 Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad (New York: Penguin, 1997). All parenthetical references follow this edition.

3 Everett Emerson, The Authentic Mark Twain (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 1984) 208.