SOURCE: “The Narrator, the Reader, and the Mariposa: The Cost of Preserving the Status Quo in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town,” in Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. 22, No. 1 Spring, 1987, pp. 51-65.

In the following essay, Zichy argues that a “special kind of equivocation” on the part of the narrator rules in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, and that the work's purpose is not to satirize the town of Mariposa but to convince the narrator himself that the town, with all its faults, is the best world after all.

Since the first signs of a considered criticism of Leacock's comic writing in the late 1950s, much of the discussion of Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town has focussed on the narrator's relation to his subject and his somewhat equivocal tone in presenting it. Some readers have judged Sunshine Sketches to be a satire, a telling exposé of...