SOPHS: Mark Twain homework due Friday, May 20

Follow this link to read "The Story of the Bad Little Boy," a Mark Twain parody of a Sunday school story.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Sunday School stories were moral tales written for the little boys and girls who learned the difference between right and wrong at their local churches in Sunday School.

These stories always ended with a good dose of poetic justice. The good boys and girls were rewarded; the not-so-good boys and girls were summarily punished, learned the error of their ways, and turned out to be model boys and girls themselves.

Mark Twain pokes fun at these stories in "The Story of the Bad Little Boy."

Assignment

Read the story and then answer these questions in your notebook/IPad. NO NEED to post. 

1. "The Story of the Bad Little Boy" is a parody of the stories in Sunday School books. Define a parody.  

2. What details contribute to the humor of "The Story of the Bad Little Boy"? List at least four. 

3. What storytelling "tricks" does Twain use to make the story entertaining, if not humorous? By tricks, I specifically mean his rhetoric (clever words and phrases, figures of speech, sound devices, or rhetorical structures). List at least four. 

4. How does the penultimate (better look up this word) paragraph contribute to the sarcasm of the story? 

5. For what serious reason did Twain write this story?