The Outcasts Of Poker Flat By Bret Harte

“The Outcasts of Poker Flat” by Bret Harte

Bret Harte, the author of the “The Outcasts of Poker Flat”, was a great American author and poet. He is best remembered for his revolutionary life in California. These people, the people with the traditional western US built him the first traditional western writer to win international popularity. “The Outcasts of Poker Flat “reflects the western attitude of his time”. “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” remains an essential bit of American literature and one of the best stories of the unpleasant and -tumble days in California Gold Rush in his use of western setting and local color.
The simplicity of this story is a result of the easy transformation of such characters as the “Duchess” a prostitute who reveals “hearts of gold” “The Mother Ship ton”old reprobate who gives up her food, and thus her life, so the innocent piney woods can live. The Uncle Billy, a town drunkard and suspected thief. The familiarities of many of Harte’s characterizations, the quick witted gambler or the prostitute with the heart of gold- attest to the durability of his impact on popular culture. Harte initially traveled to the American west in 1854 and was advantage positioned to observe one of the key occasions of the nineteenth century, the California Gold Rush. “The

Outcasts of Poker Flat” used as a forum to explore themes of tolerance and forgiveness and appearance and reality and the ominous power of nature (487).
The gambler John Oakhurst is the most fascinating and also complicated figure inside the story, actually he could be though far too, inside his philosophic mind-set toward reality.

The story describes that “This fact he pointed out to his companions curtly, with a philosophic commentary on the folly of “throwing up their hand before the game was played out”’ (488). Although he stoically accepts his fate throughout the story and reveals his basically noble nature, at the tale’s conclusion he takes his own life rather than await death by freezing and starvation. Thus he is called strongest or the weakest of the outcasts of poker

flat.
The short story “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” seeks to explore the themes of unfair and biased judgments in the hand of inappropriate individuals in authority. As the story unfolds, there was no indication that the four committed acts that merited their banishment. They were no different than many of the town folks in the “Gold Rush” places of the California immigrants who engaged in gambling, prostitution and drinking after a hard day’s work to relax and amuse them. In California town at that time where the gold rush was concentrated gamblers and drunkards of every kind and color. The only fault that Mr. Oakhurst had obviously committed was that he was a stranger who earned a fortune in his winning of poker games against the poker flat locals.
The “Outcasts of Poker flat” is an example of nineteenth-century regional literature. Regional writer portrays what is special about a particular part of the country. They write about the specific landscape, people, values and modes of life of a region. Rationalists explore issues that are common to all human beings, but they do so only way of writing about a particular time and place.
In the “outcasts of poker flat” Harte treats the conflict between society and its “outcasts” those people whose behavior is unacceptable to the moral values that the majority at least pretend to uphold. Harte explores this timeless conflict by describing the fate of some typical characters from the American frontier. Today these characters are familiar to anyone, but in the 19th century, they were new, and Harte was the one of the first to describe them.