1
Oldham
Kaitlyn Oldham
Mrs. McCrary
5th hour
9 march 2017
Twain’s Humorous Tall Tale
While waiting for a train an interesting man sits down beside Mark Twain in his humorous story “ Cannibalism in the Cars”. Twain’s new friend tells him a story about being trapped on a train due to a snowstorm. As the story goes on the man speaks about how the desperate a group of senators stuck on the train were. The senators became so desperate that they started voting on whom they were going to eat first. Twain uses logos, irony, and paradox in his short story.
By using logos Mark Twain explains the process in which the senators took to decide who they were going to devour first. These senators thought logical stating that they must decide which if them “shall die to furnish food for the rest” so that they would not have to continue to starve. The men trapped on the train start to use their political experience and began to nominate people that should die first. Even though these men were stuck on a train and were starving they were still thinking in a logical manner. The man telling the story also used dates to recall this horrendous event.
Paradox is a rhetorical device that Mark Twain utilizes in his short story. In the paragraph over the sixth day of the senators being trapped in the train Twain used a paradox when the senators state that they didn’t want their integrity to be questioned yet they were eating their fellow senators. The men state that “The Chair cannot allow the integrity of the committee to be questioned save by the regular course, under the rules” even though what they were doing wasn’t something of integrity. In the end of the short story when Twain states that he was relieved to only be listening to the “harmless vagaries of a madman” is also an example of a paradox because a story about living a cannibalistic tale isn’t truly harmless.
Irony is used in Twain’s short story. Throughout the whole story Mark Twain leads the readers to believe that the man telling him this gory horror story was one of the senators on the train that had gone through the horrible experience himself. The man speaks in first person starting the story with “On the 19th of December, 1853, I started from the evening train bound for Chicago”. He uses first person throughout the whole story making the reader think that he was apart of it. The man described how the people tasted on the train making his story even more believable. It sounded like this man was in the midst of all the chaos when in reality it was just “the harmless vagaries of a madman instead of the genuine experiences of a bloodthirsty cannibal” which relieves Mark Twain to know that his friend was not a cannibal but a madman.
Mark Twain does a tremendous job in utilizing the three rhetorical devices: irony, logos, and paradox. In his humorous short story “Cannibalism in the Cars” he creates an irony that blows the readers mind when they find out at the end that it wasn’t in fact the experience of Twain’s new “comrade” but the ramblings of a madman. Twain strategically uses logos, which made the madman’s story believable. By using paradox, Twain adds a sick twisted version of humor. In utilizing these rhetorical devices, Twain creates a humorous but gory short story.