Keeping Both Eyes Open: ‘The Stolen White Elephant’

Abstract

In this opening chapter, I look closely at one of Twain’s most puzzling short stories, ‘The Stolen White Elephant’, to identify how, in this specific case, the narrative works, and where its comic effects lie. Although my general approach in this book will be chronological, I begin with a text written in 1878, two years after the publication of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876).² It might seem perverse to disrupt my main organising principle so early. I do so because ‘The Stolen White Elephant’ provides a particularly appropriate introduction to my analysis of Twain’s work as a whole, and the problems involved in such a task.

When detectives called for a drink, the would-be facetious bar-keeper resurrected an obsolete form of expression, and said, ‘Will you have an eye-opener?’ All the air was thick with sarcasms.

(‘The Stolen White Elephant’)¹