Achilles and the tortoise

by Clark Griffith

Covering the entire body of Mark Twain's fiction, Clark Griffith in Achilles and the Tortoise answers two questions: How did Mark Twain write? and Why is he funny? Griffith defines and demonstrates Mark Twain's poetics and, in doing so, reveals Twain's ability to create and sustain human laughter. More thoroughly and authoritatively than any other critic, Griffith shows that the underlying effect of Twain's humor is negativistic, pessimistic, and nihilistic. Through a close reading of the fictions - short and long, early and late - Griffith contends that Mark Twain's strength lay not in comedy or in satire or (as the 19th century understood the term) even in the practice of humor. Rather his genius lay in the joke, specifically the "sick joke." For all his finesse and seeming variety, Twain tells the same joke, with its single cast of doomed and damned characters, its single dead-end conclusion, over and over endlessly. As he attempted to attain the comic resolution and comically trans