Patterns of Consciousness in The Innocents Abroad

Mark Twain's “Spatial Play”:Venice and the Holy Land inThe Innocents Abroad

“…Ultimately, he directs attention toward the static and emergent aspects of Twain's humor that combine to form the character of his stance. Building on the work of Smith and Cox, contemporary criticism interprets the text's polarity as showcasing “a consciousness irremediably at odds with itself, moving at great speed between mental states, [and] struggling quite in vain to find a comfortable point of vantage on a deeply unsettling experience” (Robinson 51).…”

“…The shifting, opposite perspectives from which Twain's autobiographical narrator views Venice have been examined as “cognate with thematic oppositions between romance and realism, the ‘literary’ and the ‘vernacular’ styles, ‘pilgrims’ and ‘sinners,’ Europe and America, and, by extension, with a whole world of highly polarized cultural—social, political, religious—values” (Robinson 48). Nonetheless, these oxymora do not simply reflect narrative and thematic contradictions, but rather illustrate Twain's authorial considerations.…”