Told by the Colonel — Edition Insights

The Frame and Its Ironies

The book opens with four Americans in Paris: three tourists who, after visiting the Moulin Rouge, Napoleon's tomb, and the sewers, declare themselves experts on French culture. They dismiss Paris as fifty years behind Chicago, criticize the food, and lament the lack of divorce. The colonel, silent and apart, punctures their arrogance not by argument but by ordering an owl—a request that flummoxes the waiter and reveals the tourists' inability to grasp local idioms. This frame establishes the colonel as a storyteller who operates through indirection and absurdity, using humor to expose the limits of the tourists' worldview. The excerpts do not show whether the frame recurs, but the opening suggests a structure where the colonel's tales serve as a corrective to the tourists' smugness.

Elijah's Flying-Machine

One of the colonel's tales recounts his brother Elijah's attempt to build a flying-machine from a giant kite. The kite, made with ash poles and silk, was designed to carry a boy named Aristophanes to the moon. The story dwells on technical details: the tail was made of light iron chain, the string was the size of a ship's signal-halyards, and Elijah calculated the tail length using the rule of three. The trial ends when the kite pulls Elijah off the ground, but the excerpt cuts before the resolution. What is clear is the story's affection for elaborate, doomed invention and its deadpan treatment of failure. The narrator notes that Elijah's inventions 'had a habit of proving failures,' yet the tale is told without mockery, savoring the ingenuity and the boy's placid willingness to be strapped to the kite.

Voice and Racial Stereotyping

The transcriber's note warns that the colonel's tales contain 'outdated racial stereotyping and language.' In the flying-machine excerpt, Aristophanes is described as a 'darky' who 'can hold more happiness to the square inch than any white man.' The story uses dialect and caricature typical of late-19th-century American humor. The colonel's own voice is distinct: he speaks in a measured, slightly formal tone, even when describing absurd events. The excerpts do not reveal whether the frame characters react to the racial content, but the stereotyping is integral to the period style. Readers should be aware that the humor relies on assumptions that are now recognized as offensive, and the book is best approached as a historical artifact of American storytelling conventions in the 1880s.

The colonel's tales reward readers who enjoy patient, understated humor and the mechanics of tall-tale construction. Because the excerpts cover only two stories and the opening frame, the full range of the collection—including titles like 'The Cat's Revenge' and 'Silver-Plated'—remains unknown. Approach the book as a series of self-contained anecdotes, each built around a single absurd premise, and pay attention to how the colonel's deadpan narration shapes the comedy.

The Colonel’s wild tales made me think of that strange old book we once passed around — Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh — Reading Notes. Both feel like someone half-laughing at you while they spin something oddly true. I still catch myself wondering about that talking dog, the same way I wonder about Teufelsdröckh’s coat.