I began reading Mark Twain’s complete short stories over eight years ago, as I’ve reported before on the blog. I started on them, found them too intense to read continuously until done, so put it aside. Picked it up again after a few years, put it down. I then established a pattern of getting it out whenever I finished another book and reading a few stories in it before I started a new book.
The brought me to 2017, with only one story left to read. The problem was, it was 80 pages long. “The Mysterious Stranger” looked too daunting to tackle. That’s not a short story, I thought: that’s a novella.
But I knew I needed to read it, or have another unfinished book hanging around. I finally started it on May 23 and finished it on May 28. So, the whole volume is read.
For my review though, I just want to concentrate on that last story. It’s fresh on my mind, and it’s…odd. The mysterious stranger is named Satan, and he claims to be an angel, the nephew of the more famous fallen angel of that name. He materializes in the forest, in Germany to three teen boys, and enchants them. They feel happy in his presence and sad when he leaves.
Satan tells them man isn’t the highest animal, but the lowest. The problem is man’s “moral sense,” which causes him to apply right and wrong to his actions. Most of the time, though knowing the right, man chooses the wrong.
Other animals don’t have that problem. They don’t do wrong because they have no concept of right and wrong. They just do, and have whatever natural consequences there may be.
Satan shows no concern for man. He seems willing to kill them, which gives him pleasure because it saves them from years of dealing with right and wrong. He tells how everyone’s life is fated to be something, based on a whole series of minor choices, one choice leading to another. He will cause a person to change a minor action, which might lengthen or shorted his or her life by decades.
Twain tends to paint Satan in a good way. His words always seem to be not only soothing but also logical. It makes me wonder if Satan is giving us Twain’s views of Christianity, which can only be characterized as disdain. Methinks that is the case.
So, was I enriched by reading “The Mysterious Stranger”? Or reading Twain’s stories as a whole. For sure I was. I wanted to read them, not only to help me in my short story writing by reading the one of the masters, as well as for my efforts to go back in time and read things I’d skipped for years. I’m glad I did it.
Although, I’m not sure they qualify as stories that were so good I need to read them again. In fact, I’m not going to keep the book I read. It’s a mass-market paperback. The covers came off, and the pages are beginning to crumble, all since it was printed in 1983. I have books from the 19th century that are in better shape than this. No, I won’t keep it. The stories are all in public domain now, and I can easily access them if I ever want to read them again.