The Mysterious Stranger and Twain's Thoughts about Life, Death, and God

The death of a child is never an easy thing for any parent to go through, including Samuel Clemens.  On the heels of the death of Susie Clemens, Samuel Clemens attempted to make sense of life and of death through his work as Mark Twain.  Throughout his life, as evidence through his work and his interaction with his wife Livy and various others, Twain has struggled with religion and the God of the Bible.  His story, The Mysterious Stranger, is one of many works that attempt to grapple with these ideas.  One scene at the beginning of The Mysterious Stranger sets up this struggle to understand religion, life, and death.  Satan, an angel builds a clay people then sets them in motion to live life as if they were human.  Satan even allows the children that he meets to help him build clay people – crippled and poorly made people. As soon as the people were made the “went diligently to work and cleared and leveled off a space a couple of yards square in the grass and begun to build a cunning little castle in it”(61).  In other words, they went about their little lives “as natural as life” (61).  Twain uses Satan and these clay people as a metaphor for how he views our relationship with the God of the Bible, if there was one. 

The narrator says of Satan’s behavior and thoughts of humans that we are “of paltry poor consequence; often you would think he was talking about flies, if you didn’t know” (63).  In this he sets Satan, and God, up as a character that is above the everyday existence of humanity.  Our actions, our feelings, and our lives are of no consequence to the characters Twain has created in his story and by extension of the metaphor, to God.   The narrator later says the Satan spoke of humanity in a “matter-of-course way and without bitterness, just as a person might talk about brick or manure or any other thing that was of no consequence and hadn’t feelings” (61).  The children even get wrapped up in his enchantments; they forgot everything while they reveled in the stories Satan told them.  At one point the children even laugh of when Satan had brought to life two of the worst clay people and they moved about as if they were drunk.  Their humanity was still intact, however.  They are upset when Satan crushes the poorly made clay people and he said that it didn’t matter because more can be made.  At the end of the small clay lives, Satan causes a storm and an earth quake the swallows up all the clay people.  Satan ends the lives he created with no second thought and no remorse. 

Twain’s life had been marked by several senseless and difficult to handle deaths, including the death of two of his children by this point.  Twain sees God as a figure above humanity, willing to play with lives, uncaring, and remorseless when human tragedies happen.  This worldview is no surprise coming from a deeply conflicted and cynical man with a keen eye for observation.

Mark Twain on Imperialism and America

       

     Mark Twain’s travels allowed him to have a unique perspective on America’s influence and presence in the world.  It also gave him insight into imperialism and international relations.  His thoughts on the matter are very explicitly stated in his essay “To Person Sitting in Darkness.”   He introduces the “people sitting in darkness,” as he sardonically calls anyone America has deemed uncivilized, by saying that they have been “furnished with more light than was good for them or profitable for us. We have been injudicious” (Twain, 269).  Twain uses this metaphor to introduce the supposed gifts that capitalism and imperialism offers to uncivilized and colonized nations.  Among those gifts are: love, justice, law and order, equality, mercy, and liberty – “gifts” that civilization exports but does not necessarily practice.  He says that these gifts are “merely an outside cover … while inside the bale is the Actual Thing that Costumer Sitting in Darkness buys with his blood and tears and land and liberty” (270).  A heavy price to pay for any supposed gifts. 

     Twain uses this metaphor of a person sitting in darkness to satirize America’s interactions abroad but also to call into question America.  While he wrote this he drew, not only on his experience abroad but his experience at home. His works, including this essay are woven with keen observations about American life and values in the 19^th century.  Through his work, like “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” Twain examines Jim Crowe Laws, class relations, the KKK, and various other things sitting in darkness in American society.  By pointing out the prettily packaged “Americanism” that is being sold abroad and creating a metaphor of bringing light to other, Twain is bringing light to topics that America has ignored and ideals that America has betrayed.  His outrage at the betrayal of principles happening in America is played out in his outrage about the “friendly” and “affectionate” betrayal that happens abroad, like in the Philippines.  His comments on the matter reflect what he saw closer to home:  “for we were only play the American Game in public” (276).  America, as well as the Filipino’s, are being “petted” and lied to.  The freedoms’ that American’s “enjoyed” at home were not real freedoms and that many Americans experienced no freedoms at all. 

      Like much of his work, Twain uses “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” to comment on more than what is on the surface.  He passes harsh judgment on the America of his time, both the prettily wrapped exported America, and the dark, harsh America in the beautiful package.  His work asks his readers to open their eyes and minds to the harsh realities around them and to respond.  Twain’s keen observations show a dark side to America in contrast to the happy childhood that his readers saw in work such as Tom Sawyer.