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.