Analysis of Luck

Introduction

The Narrator as Literary Device in ``Luck ' by Mark Twain
Mark Twain uses the narrator as a literary device in his short story ,
``Luck ' The author first uses his own voice to give the story an air
of authenticity . He then changes narrators , building on the original
air of authenticity to create a second authentic narrator . By using the
literary device of a first person point of view for both narrators ,
Twain is able to manipulate not only the actions that take place in the
story , but he is also able to manipulate the reader 's understanding of ,
and his or her opinion of , the characters and events in the story .
The narrator that an author chooses creates the perspective of the
story . The narrator is rarely synonymous with the author however , it
is not an unheard of occurrence for the two to be identical . Twain is
briefly the narrator of this story , given that he manipulates the
readers ' perspective by declaring this story to be a true one and not
``a fancy sketch (Twain page . He increases this authenticity by
signing his initials to the statement , thereby injecting himself into
the action of the story . Because this practice is not a common one in
fictional stories , although it was more common at the time that this
story was written than it is now , Twain 's ``appearance ' in his own
fictional work gives it a suggestion of being a work of nonfiction .
The first person narrator that Twain chooses to tell the majority of the
story is ostensibly a unnamed clergyman , formerly a ``cornet (second
lieutenant ) in the British army under a lieutenant-general the first
narrator gives the pseudonym ``Scoresby ' Simply by setting the
fiction of the need for a pseudonym for the lieutenant general , Twain
has created the suggestion of literal truth for the story about to
follow . The second narrator , however , is an unreliable one . By stating
that Scoresby 's success comes solely from luck , it...