. . It is no matter whether one talks wisdom or nonsense, the case is the same; the bulk of the enjoyment lies in the wagging of the gladsome jaw and the flapping of the sympathetic ear. . . .

There being no constraint, a change of subject is always in order, and so a body is not likely to keep pegging at a single topic until it grows tiresome. We discussed everything we knew, during the first fifteen or twenty minutes, that morning, and then branched out into the glad, free, boundless realm of things we were not certain about.

In addition, the “form” is almost identical to that of the humorous mock-oral narrative that Twain admired and described at length in an essay called “How to Tell a Story”:

The humorous story may be spun out to great length, and may wander around as much as it pleases, and arrive nowhere in particular. . . .

The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it. . . .

To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art.

The technique is also the conversion of the associative ordering of autobiographical material to the realm of fiction. He was to perfect the method in his Autobiographical Dictations of the last years of his life, when he lay in bed almost every morning and talked about “the thing uppermost in a person’s mind” in order to achieve a truth that chronological order could not.

The first segment of A Tramp Abroad ostensibly describes Heidelberg, particularly the University and the student corps. But Mark Twain deviates to describe the burlesque “Great French Duel” and to ridicule Richard Wagner (in chapters 9 and 10), and then jumps from a description of an old German actor to an anecdote of his own about an event on a Mississippi steamboat, which reminds him in turn of an anecdote involving the King of Bavaria. In chapter 26, watching fishers on Lake Lucerne sends him, incongruously, into an anecdote about Washington, D.C. “One day I thought I would stop and see a fish caught. The result brought back to my mind, very forcibly, a circumstance which I had not thought of before for twelve years.” And off we go with the story of “The Man Who Put Up at Gads-by’s.” In chapter 42, watching children playing at mountain climbing reminds the narrator of a similar scene of children in Nevada playing at silver-mining, and that leads him to an anecdote about a young boy playing God on Sunday. And in chapter 47, an incident triggers a reminiscence that occurred more than a decade earlier.

It is not surprising that the most felicitous segment of the narrative plank of A Tramp Abroad is the raft trip, which glues together chapters 14-20. These chapters echo the contrast that Mark Twain was at the same time exploring in the manuscript of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (composed between 1876 and 1883, but not published until 1885). And with the same values (but not the same language) as Huck’s, the narrator rhapsodizes on the serenity of life on a raft:

Germany, in the summer, is the perfection of the beautiful, but nobody has understood, and realized, and enjoyed the utmost possibilities of this soft and peaceful beauty unless he has voyaged down the Neckar on a raft. The motion of a raft is the needful motion; it is gentle, and gliding, and smooth, and noiseless; it calms down all feverish activities, it soothes to sleep all nervous hurry and impatience; under its restful influence all the troubles and vexations and sorrows that harass the mind vanish away, and existence becomes a dream, a charm, a deep and tranquil ecstasy.

Less successful are the narrative burlesques of the ascent of the Riffelberg (chapters 37-39), which requires the services of 154 men (including fifteen barkeepers, three chaplains, and seven cows), and the climb of Mont Blanc by telescope (chapter 44).

Nevertheless, this meandering inconsistent wandering provides the casual association that allowed Twain to insert such delightful comic narratives as “The Great French Duel,” “The Man Who Put Up at Gadsby’s,” “Nicodemus Dodge,” and “The Awful German Language.”

Twain’s most successful and hilarious tall tale in A Tramp Abroad is the incongruous deadpan story, “Jim Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn,” in chapters 2 and 3. As Walter Blair says,

just as Huckleberry Finn is the greatest of Twain’s longer comic works, “Blue-Jay Yarn” is the greatest of the shorter ones. Although it does not have the depth, the scope, or the variety of the novel, it is equally characteristic, and judged on its own terms it is in some ways superior: it has fewer flaws and greater unity. Besides, it is delightfully funny.

Twain decided that “Blue-Jay Yarn” deserved to be among his most celebrated short works. Alongside “The Celebrated [or Notorious] Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865) and “Jim Blaine and His Grandfather’s Old Ram” from chapter 53 of Roughing It (1872), the “Blue-Jay Yarn” appeared in Mark Twain’s Library of Humor (1888), an anthology of his works that he helped compile.

The success of “Blue-Jay Yarn” stems partly from its ability to mesh incongruities and absurdities in playful combination, but also from its ability to mix and modulate the voices of Mark Twain, Jim Baker, and a flock of jays. Through the use of the humanized blue-jays, Twain blends fantasy and reality by offering readers the realistic narrative voice of Jim Baker and the improbable narrative voices of the loquacious birds that surround him. And through Twain’s frame-narrative voice, we learn from the beginning that he too knows that

animals talk to each other, of course. There can be no question about that; but I suppose there are very few people who can understand them. I never knew but one man who could .