The Mysterious Stranger

Overview

About one hundred and fifty pages, written between 1897 and 1908 and published in 1916, in an Austrian village in 1590 three boys meet a beautiful youth who calls himself Satan, nephew of the fallen angel, and can create and destroy living creatures at will. He shows them the wretchedness of human life, the cruelty of the moral sense, and the meaninglessness of any human choice, and ends by declaring that nothing exists but a vagrant thought.

Twain worked on the story in three manuscripts over the last decade of his life and finished none; the book published in 1916 was assembled and altered by his literary executor.

What happens

Eseldorf. Theodor, the narrator, describes his village, asleep in the Middle Ages with its castle, its two priests and its faith, and the day he and two friends met a handsome stranger in the woods who lit a pipe with a breath.

The clay people. The stranger, who says his name is Satan and that his uncle is the famous one, makes a castle and five hundred tiny people out of clay, brings them to life, and crushes two of them for quarrelling, then wipes out the rest with a storm and an earthquake while he goes on talking.

The moral sense. Satan explains that he cannot do wrong because he has no moral sense, which is the thing that makes men able to choose evil and makes them lower than the beasts, and shows the boys how the village’s kindness turns to cruelty when Father Peter is accused of theft.

The chain of acts. He tells them that every life is a chain in which the first act fixes all the rest, and demonstrates by altering one small act in a villager’s life and showing how it changes his death; the changes he makes as favours are all deaths or madness.

The pageant of history. Satan shows the boys the history of the human race, its wars and burnings from Cain to the present and into the future, and laughs at the human race’s one effective weapon, laughter, which it never uses.

The dream. In the ending Paine took from a different manuscript, Satan tells Theodor that there is no God, no universe, no heaven or hell, that it is all a dream, and that Theodor himself is a thought, a vagrant thought wandering among the empty eternities.

How to read it

Read the story as the place where readers go to find what lay under the jokes, the last word of Twain’s fiction given to a Satan who declares that nothing exists.

Pay close attention to the argument about the moral sense, that only a creature that knows right from wrong can choose wrong, and notice that the boy narrator never argues back.

Notice the Austrian setting in 1590, the witch-burnings and the priest, and ask what Twain could say there about his own America that Huck’s Missouri would not have let him say.

Consider the textual history, three unfinished drafts patched together by an executor and an ending borrowed from another manuscript, and read the recommended edition to see what Twain actually wrote.

Read this story alongside Candide to compare two attacks on the belief that the world is well made, one that ends with a garden and one that ends with nothing at all.

Questions it raises

• Is Satan’s argument about the moral sense a serious philosophical claim, and why does Twain give no one in the story the means to answer it?
• Does the dream ending, borrowed by Paine from a different draft, complete the story or falsify it, and what did Twain’s own unfinished versions point toward?
• How does the Austrian village of 1590 stand for the America of 1900, and what does the distance permit?
• Is the story a work of despair, or is Satan’s contempt for humanity itself the target of an irony Twain did not live to finish?
• What is the role of laughter, the one weapon Satan says the race never uses, in a story by the greatest American humorist that contains no jokes?
• Can a book assembled after its author’s death from drafts he abandoned be his work at all, and what should a reader do with the version that made it famous?