Mark Twain's Use of Irony

Mark Twain, "Turning Point"

In "The Turning-Point of My Life," Mark Twain confesses that "the most important feature of my life is its literary feature" (Twain, ii). Although Twain's literary output is perhaps best remembered for fiction like Huckleberry Finn, "The Turning-Point of My Life" is a work of non-fictional memoir. However "The Turning-Point of My Life" utilizes a specific literary device to accomplish much of its storytelling goals. This is the literary device of irony, which can be loosely defined as saying one thing but meaning another, while expecting the reader to note the two different senses and react, frequently with laughter. Irony is, of course, not invariably funny -- many tragedies, like the story of Oedipus, are built upon a larger ironic structure which hardly makes us laugh. But the most important thing, according to literary scholar Wayne Booth, is that the author and reader both recognize that irony is taking place: as Booth writes in The Rhetoric of Irony, "the whole thing cannot work at all unless both parties to the exchange have confidence that they are moving together in identified patterns" (Booth 13). Therefore, in examining "The Turning-Point of My Life," it is important to realize that Twain is to some extent playing a rhetorical game with the reader, and the reader's job is to recognize the game in order to understand Twain's real meaning.

In order to establish what the rhetorical device of irony is, and the way that Twain uses it, let us look at an incident that Twain recounts towards the middle of "The Turning-Point of My Life." This is an autobiographical piece not a work of fiction, however, as Ben Tarnoff has noted, "ironic narcissism is more or less our national default mode now, but Twain was ahead of his time" (Tarnoff In Part II, Twain is describing an incident from his childhood: his father had died in the spring when Twain was twelve years old, and a few months later in summer an epidemic of measles strikes the town where the twelve-year-old Mark Twain is living. He describes his depression -- probably over the death of his father, although he does not make the connection explicit, he merely lists the two events in chronological order and allows the reader to make the connection -- and describes the solution he attempted. A friend of his is sick with the measles epidemic, and Twain deliberately attempts to catch the disease:

I escaped from the house and went to the house of a neighbor where a playmate of mine was very ill with the malady. When the chance offered I crept into his room and got into bed with him. I was discovered by his mother and sent back into captivity. But I had the disease; they could not take that from me. I came near to dying. The whole village was interested, and anxious, and sent for news of me every day; and not only once a day, but several times. Everybody believed I would die; but on the fourteenth day a change came for the worse and they were disappointed. (Twain, ii)

Now first of all, we need to understand the way in which Twain represents painful autobiographical material in this section without making the emotional valence explicit. Nowhere is the word "suicide" used, although Twain describes the incident as being somewhat similar to a suicide attempt. Twain catching the measles is recounted not as a tragic suicide attempt, but as a boyish triumph of being allowed to do what he wants, even if it is forbidden to him by adults: "I had the disease; they could not take that from me" is a kind of ironic joke here, because ordinarily catching measles is something people try to avoid.

But the purest example of irony comes in that final sentence: "on the fourteenth day a change came for the worse and they were disappointed." Ordinarily, this sentence would indicate the precise opposite outcome of the story that's being told: when someone has measles, if a "change came for the worse" that usually means the disease has become fatal, and being "disappointed" means that the town is grieving for the death of a child. Twain's joke here is that, of course, not only did he survive -- considering this is an autobiographical piece written at the height of Twain's fame, the reader obviously knows this -- but also that his survival counted as a "change..for the worse" in the minds of his fellow citizens. The joke is that Twain's deliberate choice to catch measles indicated that he was either so stupid or so suicidal that his survival would not actually improve the society in which he lived. But it is also a joke at the expense of the people who make up that society, insofar as Twain suggests they are more "disappointed" at the failure of a child to die than they would have been by the death. "A change came for the worse" means that Twain's survival was actually worse for the world than his death, in the opinion of the townspeople.