The Mysterious Stranger, Mark Twain - Buford Scrivner, Jr. (essay date 1975)
Buford Scrivner, Jr. (essay date 1975)
SOURCE: "The Mysterious Stranger: Mark Twain's New Myth of the Fall," in Mark Twain Journal 17, No. 4, Summer, 1975, pp. 20-1.
[In the following essay, Scrivner presents The Mysterious Stranger as Twain's attempt to rewrite the Biblical myth of the fall of humanity .]
To understand the pattern of organization and thematic concern which operate together to make a unified work of Twain's Mysterious Stranger, one must see the events of the story in relation to a Christian world view according to which temporal history begins with the fall from innocence. The Mysterious Stranger is the working out of a kind of restoration, or anti-fall, which reverses the baneful consequences of the fall of man by negating altogether the Christian world view which established and sustains such a belief.
It was the proffered knowledge of good and evil with which the serpent tempted Eve, the...
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