Reader's Journal#10 The Celebrated Jumping Frog--- Short Story

Readers Journal#10

                                                                                                        11/6/11

Dear Mrs. Zrihen,

I have finished The Celebrated Jumping Frog by Mark Twain. The strategies I used before reading were reading the reviews on websites like Amazon and Barnes and Nobel to see if the book was interesting to me, I also looked at the cover page for picture clues, read the title so I see if I can find a visualize what the story is going to be about. Another thing I used was to skim and scan to see if I can understand a random page. The strategies I used while reading were, visualizing the situation of the story in my head and looking for words that were not in my comprehension, and then looking them up on the dictionary to find it out. The figurative language in this book that I found was, Hyperbole, he uses exaggeration a handful of times in this story, to make the story more interesting and humorous to the readers.

The quote that caught my eye was “Well, thish-yer Smiley had a yaller one-eyed cow that didn’t have no tail, only just a short stump like a bannaner, and-” I chose this quote because it represents the way that “Hillbillys” used their slang in the 1800’s.

The genre of this story is a short story because it is a work of fiction that can be read in one setting, generally makes one major conflict. The setting is in Calaveras County, California. The time this book was taken place was in 1849, and the weather conditions were not confirmed but my guess is that it was sunny because a lot of the bets he makes are taken place outside and he was a gold miner and conditions to do that is for it to be sunny. The moral is to never put money where your mouth is because things can change in a heartbeat and that hit the main character very hard in a funny way. The tone in this book is humorous because there is a funny chain of events that come in the story. The point of view is in the narrators. The main characters in the story are Jim Smiley, his frog Daniel Webster and the “feller”. Jim is a flat and static. He is flat because he was always a betting person from the beginning of the story to the end of it, so he remains the same. The exposition of the work appears at the beginning of the book where the characters and the setting are described. The rising action starts when he bets with the “feller” that tricked him when he put BB gun pellets into his frog’s throat and made him lose the bet. In the climax, he discovers what happened to his frog Daniel Webster. In that event effected the outcome of the story. The falling action starts when Jim tries to hunt down the “Feller” that ripped him off and ran away with his money.

The response starter I used was that I predicted that “I predict that_________” He was going to lose a bet sooner or later.

The rate that I would give this book would have to be a 8 out of 10 because of its humor and how the moral the stories. Its sort of hard to read because Mark Twain used a lot of slang from the 1800’s that we don’t use anymore.

Your student,

Alan Alvarez