Dec 30, 2009

The Invalid's Story | Introduction

‘‘The Invalid's Story,’’ Mark Twain's raucous story about a case of mistaken identities that eventually kills a man, is considered by many critics to have no literary value. Still, even though some critics have panned the story, it is often reproduced in collections of Twain's stories and others have noted that it is a good example of the frontier-style humor for which Twain was known. The story details the unfortunate misadventures of two men on a train who mistake a gunbox and a piece of rotting cheese for a smelly corpse in a coffin. The two men try many tactics in an attempt to fight the smell of the "corpse," but in the end, all of their efforts are fruitless. The themes range from mortality and the proper behavior towards the dead, to the power of imagination to overcome reason.

It is believed that Twain wrote the story in the 1870s, about a decade after he began what would be an illustrious career. During this time, America's railroads were experiencing their Golden Age, as people relied mainly on trains for both travel and the transportation of everything from coffins to food products. First published in The Stolen White Elephant, Etc. in London in 1882, the story can be found in The Signet Classic Book Of Mark Twain's Short Stories, published in 1985.

The Invalid's Story Summary

At the beginning of Twain's "The Invalid's Story,'' the narrator explains that he looks and feels older than he is and that he used to be much healthier than he is now. He attributes his decline in health to the strange events of one winter night, in which he traveled with a box of guns for two hundred miles.

The narrator recalls how, two years before, he had arrived at his home in Cleveland, Ohio and learned of the recent death of his friend, John B. Hackett. Following Hackett' s last wishes, the narrator leaves for the train station to take Hackett's body back to his parents in Bethlehem, Wisconsin.

The narrator finds a white-pine box at the train station that matches the description of the coffin. He attaches the address card from Hackett's father, Deacon Levi Hackett, to the white-pine box, and has it loaded into the train on the express car—a method for transporting packages by train that was safer and faster, but more expensive, than normal freight cars.

The narrator leaves to get food and cigars, and when he comes back to the area where he had first found the white-pine box, a young man is tacking an address card onto an identical box.

The narrator checks to make sure his white-pine box is still in the express car, which it is. At this point, the narrator lets the reader know that the boxes are labeled wrong. The first box, the one in the express car, which the narrator assumes is the corpse of his friend, is actually a box of guns that is meant to go to Peoria, Illinois. Conversely, the second box, which the young man assumes contains the guns, actually contains John Hackett's corpse.

However, the narrator is not aware of this fact at the time that he is taking the train trip. He settles into the express car, where he and the expressman— the man hired by... » Complete The Invalid's Story Summary