No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger | Epilogue: The Dream of Mark Twain

In the following essay excerpt, Kahn uses the ideas of seventeenth-century, French philosopher René Descartes to explicate the meaning of Twain’s ‘‘The Mysterious Stranger’’ manuscripts.

What was it, after all, that Mark Twain succeeded in saying in ‘‘No. 44’’? We must accept the legitimacy of nuanced variety in interpretations, but we must insist also on the primacy of Mark Twain’s own text. Though chapter 34 has been much read and analyzed, this has usually been done in misleading contexts. We have noted most of the previous interpretations—nihilism, solipsism, ‘‘extreme Platonism,’’ the magic of art, hoax, escape from reality— and we have seen that there is some justification for all of them in words Mark Twain actually wrote. I should like,...

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