At the opening of Samuel L. Clemens' "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," (also called "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," the "notorious" probably developed as familiarity with the story's content grew and people realized how little the narrator was actually inclined to celebrate the story) the reader finds a first-person narrator who is comically cynical, a lovable curmudgeon who essentially tells the reader that what follows is useless information, and a waste of his time repeating it. Immediately he starts to throw out names and characteristics, of characte…
