Mark Twain's Use of Irony Essay

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Mark Twain, "Turning Point"

In "The Turning-Point of My Life," Mark Twain confesses that "the most important feature of my life is its literary feature" (Twain, ii). Although Twain's literary output is perhaps best remembered for fiction like Huckleberry Finn, "The Turning-Point of My Life" is a work of non-fictional memoir. However "The Turning-Point of My Life" utilizes a specific literary device to accomplish much of its storytelling goals. This is the literary device of irony, which can be loosely defined as saying one thing but meaning another, while expecting the reader to note the two different senses and react, frequently with laughter. Irony is, of course, not invariably funny -- many tragedies, like the story of Oedipus, are built upon a larger ironic structure which hardly makes us laugh. But the most important thing, according to literary scholar Wayne Booth, is that the author and reader both recognize that irony is taking place: as Booth writes in The Rhetoric of Irony, "the whole thing cannot work at all unless both parties to the exchange have confidence that they are moving together in identified patterns" (Booth 13). Therefore, in examining "The Turning-Point of My Life," it is important to realize that Twain is to some extent playing a rhetorical game with the reader, and the reader's job is to recognize the game in order to understand Twain's real meaning.

In order to establish what the rhetorical device of irony is, and the way that Twain uses it, let us look at an incident that Twain recounts towards the middle of "The Turning-Point of My Life." This is an autobiographical piece not a work of fiction, however, as Ben Tarnoff has noted, "ironic narcissism is more or less our national default mode now, but Twain was ahead of his time" (Tarnoff In Part II, Twain is describing an incident from his childhood: his father had died in the spring when Twain was twelve years old, and a few months later in summer an epidemic of measles strikes the town where the twelve-year-old Mark Twain is living.

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He describes his depression -- probably over the death of his father, although he does not make the connection explicit, he merely lists the two events in chronological order and allows the reader to make the connection -- and describes the solution he attempted. A friend of his is sick with the measles epidemic, and Twain deliberately attempts to catch the disease:

I escaped from the house and went to the house of a neighbor where a playmate of mine was very ill with the malady. When the chance offered I crept into his room and got into bed with him. I was discovered by his mother and sent back into captivity. But I had the disease; they could not take that from me. I came near to dying. The whole village was interested, and anxious, and sent for news of me every day; and not only once a day, but several times. Everybody believed I would die; but on the fourteenth day a change came for the worse and they were disappointed. (Twain, ii)

Now first of all, we need to understand the way in which Twain represents painful….....

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