Adam: The Lazy Load
Eve’s adventurousness is juxtaposed most starkly to Adam whom she describes as a creature “more interested in resting than anything else.” And then she immediately unleashes some more great ironic self-reflection and then a helping of ironic foreshadowing to boot:
“It would tire me to rest so much. It tires me just to sit around and watch the tree.”
Eve was a Southpaw?
Eve is far more adventurous than Adam. Even though she knows stars are farther away than they appear, one night she decides to try to knock one down to keep for herself by throwing dirt clods into the sky. The reasoning behind her failure is perhaps the most delightfully weird and unexpected irony in the text:
“It was because I am left-handed and cannot throw good.”
Eve and Adam
“When I found it could talk I felt a new interest in it, for I love to talk; I talk, all day, and in my sleep, too, and I am very interesting, but if I had another to talk to I could be twice as interesting, and would never stop, if desired.”
The full breadth and depth of the irony of this bit of self-reflection—and it is very wide and twice as deep—cannot be fully appreciated without reading Adam’s diary entries.
Irony Upon Irony
In Twain’s rewrite of Book of Genesis, Eve is finally exonerated—completely—of the charge of being responsible for Fall of mankind. Turns out it was Adam’s fault because the key to losing paradise was not apples, but chestnuts and the chestnuts were not actually nuts, but tired, old, unfunny jokes. Adam’s understanding of the significance of this information is loaded with multiple ironies related to the legend of the fall, Adam's sense of humor and, especially, the meaning of radiance:
“Alas, I am indeed to blame. Would that I were not witty; oh, would that I had never had that radiant thought!”
Eve: The Mother Load
While Adam can’t quite figure out what Cain actually is, biologically speaking—since as a baby he looks so dramatically unlike the only two humans to which it can be compared—Eve immediately bonds with the creature. The ironic comparison of Adam’s description of Eve on Sundays now that she’s a mother with Eve’s earlier description of Adam every single day is just the opening to the labyrinth of irony at work in this entry:
“She doesn't work Sundays, but lies around all tired out and likes to have the fish [Cain] wallow over her, and she makes fool noises to amuse it…I have come to like Sunday myself. Superintending all the week tires a body so. There ought to be more Sundays. In the old days they were tough, but now they come handy.”
