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What is your opinion of the two men in Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat who fooled the writer and his friends when the professor sang his...

This incident is related in Chapter VIII of Three Men in a Boat. The narrator refers to an evening when he and his friends were at a party and everyone in attendance was happy and was having a good time. That is, everyone except for two young students who had just come back from Germany. The narrator describes them as seeming



restless and uncomfortable, as if they found the proceedings slow. The truth was, we were too clever for them. Our brilliant but polished conversation, and our high-class taste, were beyond them. They were out of place, among us. They never ought to have been there at all. Everybody agreed upon that, later on.



The two young men decide to play a trick on the rest of the party-goers, most likely in an effort to take everyone down a peg and to embarrass the whole group, as revenge for feeling out of place. They boast that Herr Slossenn Boschen, a fellow guest at the event, could sing a song that would amuse the audience greatly. Herr Boschen then sings it in German, and the people who cannot understand German (including the narrator) follow the reactions of the two young men in order to know when to laugh and how loudly. They all do this, and everyone laughs as the song progresses.


Well, Herr Boschen is not happy or laughing at all. It turns out that the lyrics of the song are quite serious. They tell the story of a woman and her lover who both die, and the man jilts her spirit in the afterlife.  The professor tells the people that this is “one of the most tragic and pathetic songs in the German language.” The party-goers are upset that they have been fooled and embarrassed, and the party quickly breaks up as a result. The two men had disappeared by this time. They were nasty enough to ruin the gathering and to upset everyone (including the singing professor), and cowardly enough to run out before they could be confronted and chastised for their behavior. They were immature and rude. Polite adults don’t act like this. But they made for an interesting story for the narrator to tell us.

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