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!”
Harte’s literary and poetic style is especially evident in figurative language like “Nature took the foundling to her broader breast” and “that air pungent with balsamic odor, that ethereal cordial at once bracing and exhilarating.” Here, he personifies nature in order to communicate how at home baby Luck feels in Roaring Camp, and he uses imagery to help readers imagine the “ethereal” smell of the camp.
It is notable that Harte chooses to conclude that paragraph with Stumpy’s crude exclamation that “Me and that ass […] has been father and mother to him!” By juxtaposing the narrator’s flowery and descriptive style with Stumpy’s oversimplified and grammatically incorrect language, Harte simultaneously hopes to make readers laugh and also shows that, even though these men don’t speak poetically, they see how growing up amongst nature has a positive effect on baby Luck. In other words, the men don’t have to be particularly sophisticated in order to be responsible and attuned caregivers.
