“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” contains a frame story, meaning that it features a first-person narrator setting up—or “framing”—a separate story told by someone else. In this case, an unnamed narrator from the East Coast who visited a mining town in Northern California in the mid-1800s offers three paragraphs of introduction about his experience before turning the narration over to the old miner, Wheeler, whom he encountered in a bar during his stay.
The following passage comes at the conclusion of the narrator’s introduction as he sets up Wheeler’s story about his friend Jim Smiley:
He never smiled, he never frowned, he never changed his voice from the gentle-flowing key to which he tuned his initial sentence, he never betrayed the slightest suspicion of enthusiasm; but all through the interminable narrative there ran a vein of impressive earnestness and sincerity, which showed me plainly that, so far from his imagining that there was anything ridiculous or funny about his story, he regarded it as a really important matter, and admired its two heroes as men of transcendent genius in finesse.
Here, the narrator establishes for readers why he is putting time into capturing the drunken Wheeler’s story word-for-word—he admired “the gentle-flowing key” of the man’s story as well as the “impressive earnestness and sincerity” with which he told it. Despite (presumably) coming from an elite East Coast background, the narrator appreciates how Wheeler embodies the working-class Western oral storytelling tradition, and he honors this by framing Wheeler’s story as “a really important matter” (even as he also humorously describes it as “interminable”).
