Excerpt from Mark Twain’s A Tramp Abroad.
Another time, we went to Mannheim and attended…an opera. The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief. The racking and pitiless pain of it remains stored up in my memory alongside the memory of the time that I had my teeth fixed.
There were circumstances which made it necessary for me to stay through the four hours to the end, and I stayed; but the recollection of that long, dragging, relentless season of suffering is indestructible. To have to endure it in silence, and sitting still, made it all the harder. I was in a railed compartment with eight or ten strangers, of the two sexes, and this compelled repression; yet at times the pain was so exquisite that I could hardly keep the tears back.
Question
Twain has a very distinctive voice.
What specific words and phrases capture Twain’s voice in the passage?
Select each correct answer.
Responses
I was in a railed compartment with eight or ten strangers… and this compelled repression…
I was in a railed compartment with eight or ten strangers… and this compelled repression…,
The racking and pitiless pain of it remains… alongside the memory of the time that I had my teeth fixed.
The racking and pitiless pain of it remains… alongside the memory of the time that I had my teeth fixed.
“There were circumstances which made it necessary for me to stay through the four hours to the end. . .”
“There were circumstances which made it necessary for me to stay through the four hours to the end. . .”,
Another time, we went to Mannheim and attended… an opera.