The Luck of Roaring Camp

by Bret Harte

The Luck of Roaring Camp: Style 1 key example

Style
Explanation and Analysis:

The writing style of “The Luck of Roaring Camp” combines literary and formal narration with highly informal and colloquial dialogue between the characters. This mixture of styles comes across in passages like the following (in which the narrator reflects on the period after baby Luck’s birth):

Strange to say, the child thrived […] Nature took the foundling to her broader breast. In that rare atmosphere of the Sierra foothills,—that air pungent with balsamic odor, that ethereal cordial at once bracing and exhilarating, —he may have found food and nourishment, or a subtle chemistry that transmuted asses’ milk to lime and phosphorus. Stumpy inclined to the belief that it was the latter and good nursing. “Me and that ass,” he would say, “has been father and mother to him!”