Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain - Analysis

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Themes

  • Attempt at objectivity
  • (Mock) pleasure at being chosen
  • Celebrity culture
  • Fascination and intimidation by celebrities or educated people
  • Everyone's going to Europe
·       Tourism is like home away from home
When it rained the passengers had to stay in the house, of course—or at least the cabins

·       Writing is important part of travel but gets tedious
some twenty or thirty gentlemen and ladies sat them down under the swaying lamps and for two or three hours wrote diligently in their journals. Alas! that journals so voluminously begun should come to so lame and impotent a conclusion as most of them did! I doubt if there is a single pilgrim of all that host but can show a hundred fair pages of journal concerning the first twenty days' voyaging in the Quaker City, and I am morally certain that not ten of the party can show twenty pages of journal for the succeeding twenty thousand miles of voyaging!

·       Outsider and insider alternating POVs
An attempt was made to organize a debating club, but it was a failure. There was no oratorical talent in the ship.
We all enjoyed ourselves—I think I can safely say that, but it was in a rather quiet way.

  • Instead of viewing attractions, they become the attraction
Altogether, ours was a lively and a picturesque procession, and drew crowded audiences to the balconies wherever we went. 

·       Delight in the new
It was fun, scurrying around the breezy hills and through the beautiful canyons. There was that rare thing, novelty, about it; it was a fresh, new, exhilarating sensation, this donkey riding, and worth a hundred worn and threadbare home pleasures.

·       Enjoy being unique/doing things few others do
At this present moment half a dozen of us are taking a private pleasure excursion of our own devising. We form rather more than half the list of white passengers on board a small steamer bound for the venerable Moorish town of Tangier, Africa

·       Gullible tourists

·       Desire for foreignness

·       Frivolous tourists
It seems like profanation to laugh and jest and bandy the frivolous chat of our day amid its hoary relics

·       Expected vs reality
"Billfinger! Oh, carry me home to die!"

·       Appreciation of life back home
They are curious people. They do not know when they are well off.

  • Expectations from home; comparisons to things back home
I knew it was just about the length of the capitol at Washington--say seven hundred and thirty feet. I knew it was three hundred and sixty-four feet wide, and consequently wider than the capitol

·       Huge size of things

·       Huge amounts of people

·       Irony about the benevolence of Christians
No, she put them in this pleasant Inquisition and pointed to the Blessed Redeemer, who was so gentle and so merciful toward all men, and they urged the barbarians to love him; and they did all they could to persuade them to love and honor him--first by twisting their thumbs out of joint with a screw; then by nipping their flesh with pincers--red-hot ones, because they are the most comfortable in cold weather

·       Mocking American critics

·       Complaining

·       They get their jollies from torturing the guide rather than from the sites

·       Ridicule of academic certifications

·       Becoming jaded and immune to curiosities
If you want dwarfs—I mean just a few dwarfs for a curiosity—go to Genoa. If you wish to buy them by the gross, for retail, go to Milan.

·       Increasing search for pleasure

·       Difference between judgment abroad and at home
They say the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy. It makes our cheeks burn with shame to see such a thing permitted here in Turkey. We do not mind it so much in Salt Lake, however.

·       Morality
Greek, Turkish and Armenian morals consist only in attending church regularly on the appointed Sabbaths, and in breaking the ten commandments all the balance of the week. It comes natural to them to lie and cheat in the first place, and then they go on and improve on nature until they arrive at perfection.

·       Common tourist lies
Here endeth my experience of the celebrated Turkish bath, and here also endeth my dream of the bliss the mortal revels in who passes through it. It is a malignant swindle. The man who enjoys it is qualified to enjoy any thing that is repulsive to sight or sense, and he that can invest it with a charm of poetry is able to do the same with any thing else in the world that is tedious, and wretched, and dismal, and nasty. 

·       Implied monotony of travel
I enjoyed myself very well. Syrian travel has its interesting features, like travel in any other part of the world, and yet to break your leg or have the cholera adds a welcome variety to it.

·       Tourists look ridiculous/don't fit in
our party of eight is the most so—they do cut such an outlandish figure. They travel single file; … I wouldn't let any such caravan go through a country of mine.

·       People spoil experience of nature
Barring the proximity of the village, it is a sort of paradise.

·       Vandalism

·       All experiences meld into each other – for instance, they call all their guides ferguson

·       Skepticism
Till we came to a bramble-infested inclosure and a Roman-looking ruin which had been the veritable dwelling of St. Mary Magdalene, the friend and follower of Jesus. The guide believed it, and so did I. I could not well do otherwise, with the house right there before my eyes as plain as day

·       Literary criticism
This is not an ingenious picture. It is the worst I ever saw. It describes in elaborate detail what it terms a "terrestrial paradise," and closes with the startling information that this paradise is "a scene of desolation and misery."

·       Guidebooks lead to preconceived notion and skew the experience              

Style and devices

  • Excitement
  • Expectation countered with reality
  • Rhetorical questions
What was there lacking about that program to make it perfectly irresistible? Nothing that any finite mind could discover

  • Exclamation marks & lists
Paris, England, Scotland, Switzerland, Italy—Garibaldi! The Grecian Archipelago! Vesuvius! Constantinople! Smyrna! The Holy Land! Egypt and "our friends the Bermudians"!

  • Humor
I did avoid a critical personal examination into my character by that bowelless committee, but I referred to all the people of high standing I could think of in the community who would be least likely to know anything about me.

  • Dashes
  • Lists
He designed St. Peter's; he designed the Pope; he designed the Pantheon, the uniform of the Pope's soldiers, the Tiber, the Vatican, the Coliseum, the Capitol, the Tarpeian Rock, the Barberini Palace, St. John Lateran, the Campagna, the Appian Way, the Seven Hills, the Baths of Caracalla, the Claudian Aqueduct, the Cloaca Maxima

·       Cynicism
Ah, a beggar has to have exceedingly good points to make a living in Constantinople.

·       Irreverence for famous sites
I do not think much of the Mosque of St. Sophia. I suppose I lack appreciation. We will let it go at that. It is the rustiest old barn in heathendom.

·       Text-within-text

·       Run on sentences
If these unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of barrenness, that never, never, never do shake the glare from their harsh outlines, and fade and faint into vague perspective; that melancholy ruin of Capernaum; this stupid village of Tiberias, slumbering under its six funereal plumes of palms; yonder desolate declivity where the swine of the miracle ran down into the sea, and doubtless thought it was better to swallow a devil or two and get drowned into the bargain than have to live longer in such a place; this cloudless, blistering sky; this solemn, sailless, tintless lake, reposing within its rim of yellow hills and low, steep banks, and looking just as expressionless and unpoetical (when we leave its sublime history out of the question,) as any metropolitan reservoir in Christendom—if these things are not food for rock me to sleep, mother, none exist, I think.

·       Quoting other guides

Frequently occurring words

  • Pic-nic
  • Steamer
  • Horse billiards
  • Sea

People and places

  • America
  • Mr. Blucher
  • Captain Bursley
  • Captain L****
  • Captain Jones
  • Jack
  • Quaker City (the ship)
  • New York
  • ‘Paris, England, Scotland, Switzerland, Italy—Garibaldi! The Grecian Archipelago! Vesuvius! Constantinople! Smyrna! The Holy Land! Egypt and "our friends the Bermudians"!’
  • George
  • Azores
  • Flores
  • San Miguel
  • Fayal
  • Horta
  • Portuguese
  • The Oracle
  • Strait of Gibraltar
  • Spain
  • Tangier
  • A. Billfinger
  • Dan (really funny)
  • Ferguson
  • Napoleon III
  • Abdul Aziz
  • Fuad Pucha
  • "the doctor"
Mark Twain
Mark Twain. Image source

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