Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger: Original vs. Edited

Introduction

Mark Twain wrote "The Mysterious Stranger" at the end of his life, near the conclusion of a long and renowned career. The version most often studied in colleges is a heavily edited adaptation of Twain's original writing. This paper examines the differences between the original manuscript and the edited version, including how Twain's personal tragedies affected his mental health and, ultimately, his prose. The version edited by Paine and Duneka was an attempt to preserve Twain's public image — but was that effort also a response to his mental state? And did that mental state shape the writing of "The Mysterious Stranger" in the first place?

Known for his biting sarcasm and supreme wit, Twain was an American legend by the time "The Mysterious Stranger" was published in 1916, six years after his death. The story immediately appears to deviate from his earlier work. Its subject matter is dark and unsettling compared to books such as Roughing It, where wit and humor were the primary reasons the work sold so well. Readers were accustomed to Twain making them think and laugh simultaneously, but "The Mysterious Stranger" made most people simply uncomfortable. Perhaps that discomfort arose because the story hit too close to home, confronting readers with the absolute hopelessness Twain portrays at the book's end.

The Setting and Central Themes

The story opens in 1590 in Eseldorf, Austria — a peaceful community with its share of local scandals, including Peter the priest, who is suspended for saying "that God was all goodness and would find a way to save all his poor human children."

In "The Mysterious Stranger," Twain formulates his final diagnosis of the human condition and proposes a remedy. In answer to the narrator's claim that the human race possesses a sense of humor, Satan argues that most people have only a "mongrel perception of humor," enabling them to:

"see the comic side of a thousand low-grade and trivial things — broad incongruities, mainly… evokers of the horse-laugh. The ten thousand high-grade comicalities which exist in the world are sealed from their dull vision. Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them — and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon — laughter… Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. You are always fussing and fighting with your other weapons. Do you ever use that one?… No; you lack sense and the courage."

At the beginning of the story, Twain calls Eseldorf a "paradise," and the meaning is deliberate: he intends to show the paradox that heaven can also create hell, and that the two can easily exist side by side — indeed, they exist within each of us every day. He attempts to show his readers the folly of thinking in absolutes of black and white, right and wrong, and the ultimate paradox of life itself. "Eseldorf was a paradise for us boys. We were not overmuch pestered with schooling. Mainly we were trained to be good Christians; to revere the Virgin, the Church, and the saints above everything."

Then Satan makes an appearance, and the people of Eseldorf encounter what the devil truly thinks of humanity: "Once he even said, in so many words, that our people down here were quite interesting to him, notwithstanding they were so dull and ignorant and trivial and conceited, and so diseased and rickety, and such a shabby, poor, worthless lot all around." People are of no value to the devil, and this heartless vision of humanity was so unlike Twain's earlier public persona that speculation arose as to whether he actually wrote the book — or was in an unsound state of mind when he did.

Twain's Personal Tragedies and Mental State

In fact, the more one examines the later years of Mark Twain's life, the more one is compelled toward the conclusion that something was gravely amiss with his inner life. There was the frequently noted fear of solitude — a dread of being alone with himself — that made him, for example, beg for just one more game of billiards at four o'clock in the morning.

Was Twain truly mentally unstable when he wrote "The Mysterious Stranger," or was he simply old, tired, and disillusioned? While his works brought him fame, his life was far from easy. He was called the "Lincoln of literature" during his lifetime, yet he was not always financially successful or able to provide for his family as he believed he should. He made a fortune, lost it, and made another through hard work. By the time he wrote this piece, he had lost his wife, his beloved daughter Susy, and his younger brother. He seemed to welcome death even as he feared it.

However, Twain had written of anger and contempt within himself even in his younger years. As Van Wyck Brooks records, Twain once wrote, "almost at the beginning of his career: 'You observe that under a cheerful exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt.' That spirit remained with him, grew in him, to the last."

It is this spirit of anger and self-contempt — directed both inward and at humanity — that made his satire so keen and biting. He could always perceive the weakness of people and their beliefs. Many critics believe that "Clemens' despair was not primarily personal, but had an objective basis in his observation of historical change in the world around him." In this tale, Satan's morbid contempt for the human race, which he considers worse than animals, seems to be an extension of Twain's own bitterness at the perplexities of human nature and belief.

Conclusion

Twain had a variety of mental and physical ailments at the end of his life. He was bitter, lonely, felt himself contemptible and angry, and looked at death as something of a blessing and a release. The longer he lived among humankind, the more he came to despise their "Moral Sense" and self-righteousness. Always a master of satire, "The Mysterious Stranger" captures Twain at his sharpest — sarcastic and caustic — and at his most exposed: an embittered and lonely old man who could see little but the evil in his fellow human beings. In the story's final lines, Satan declares, "It is all a dream — a grotesque and foolish dream."