WHAT STUMPED THE BLUE JAYS

Determination allows people, or in this case a blue jay, to attempt difficult tasks even if they
fail to succeed.
In the short story “What stumped the blue jays” of Mark Twain, he writes about a blue jay that
comes across a problem. This problem begins when the blue jay finds an abandoned house
with a hole in the roof. The bird wanted to know where the whole went so he dropped an
acorn down it, and listened for it to drop. When he didn’t hear the acorn drop he went and got
more and more acorns to drop them. When he got to tired of retrieving acorns, he began to sit
on top of the house swearing at the whole, so he called in other blue jays to come observe for
themselves.
When more and more birds arrive and place an acorn down the hole they all began to
speculate about theories of where the acorns are going. At the end of the story one old bird
opens the front door of the house and finds all the acorns on the floor of the house, and all of
the birds begin to laugh that the acorns were on the floor the whole time. The first bird also
laugh, realizing that he mistake the house for a tree.
In this story Twain is signifying that the blue jays are actually humans. He even stated in the
book, “a jay is everything that a man is. A jay can cry, a jay can laugh, a jay can feel shame, a
jay can reason and plan and discuss, a jay likes gossip and scandal, a jay has got a sense of
humor a jay knows when he is an ass just as well as you do,maybe better. If a jay ain't
human, he better take in his sign, that's all”. By those words Mark Twain says that the blue
jays are closely related to humans. In the whole tale Twain explores this idea with different
examples, such as personality and the way we solve problems.
The latter one is a perfect example of how people have different ways of tackling problems.
Some swear at the problem while others theorize of why the problem is happening, and
others will search for a different approach to the problem. Also shows us that determination is
the key to find the solution to a problem, when the first blue jay saw the task he had in front of
him he never gave up, even when he was tired and barely could move his wings to put more
acorns in the house. All of these different approaches when working together, can solve any
problem, even just a simple hole in the roof. Twain exemplifies this by stating, “There must
have been five thousand of them; and such another jawing and disputing and ripping and
cussing, you never heard. Every jay in the whole lot put his eye to the hole and delivered a
more chuckle-headed opinion about the mystery than the jay that went there before him”. This
quote shows when the problem of the hole was at its ultimate annoyance and how the
different jays worked with determination through the problem.
Mark Twain’s description of the blue jays is directly related to humans in the story of what
stumped the blue jays. Through his connection of personality and problem solving he
exemplifies his metaphoric meaning of the story, which is that the blue jays are actually
humans.