by Mark Twain
There is an excellent moment when, to entertain Henry's children, the Mad Passenger sets up a microscope. "A curious feeling came over me. It seemed to me that I had seen the same thing done before; even that I had done it myself -- in a dream.
It was a strange sensation, and troubled me. Then the Mad Passenger put a drop of water on a glass slide, threw a circle of white light under it from the reflector, screwed the lens down tight against it, and soon the children were exclaiming over the hideous animals they saw darting about and fighting in the bit of moisture." This is well conceived and one is sorry that Mark did not keep it when he changed his scheme.
The Mad Passenger had been aboard the ship for twenty-two years and has no hope of revisiting his country. He is here as a result of taking some friends to cruise in the great darkness. In a snow squall he was swept off his yacht and aboard the passing ship. The years of longing have taught him to endure his exile with fortitude. . . . One day, in his absence, Henry picks up a portfolio which contains drawings and photographs of the Mad Passenger, his family, and ladies and gentlemen obviously his friends -- "in some cases beautifully clothed but in most cases naked." A moment later,
"I heard him coming. I put the book away and prepared myself to look like a person who had not discovered a disgraceful secret and who was not shocked. I arranged a pleasant smile and . . ."
Here the Mad Passenger manuscript ends. Its intent is obvious. Mark had begun
"The Great Dark" intending to use a device which he had used so often before, which he was soon to use again in The Mysterious Stranger and later in "Letters from the Earth," a traveler making observations on the illogicalities and absurdities of human civilization.
After deciding to abandon this satirical device, he rewrote the story from the dinner on to the present end. He deleted from the manuscript all the preceding preparation for the Mad Passenger story except occasional touches which, on the assumption that their retention was inadvertent, I have dropped out. But he also, either then or at some later time, made other revisions and marked still other passages for modification. Wherever I can be sure of his revisions I have followed them in this text. In passages where I am not sure -- passages which are either rewritten in a way that does not seem to make sense or are marked for revision but not revised throughout -- I have had to adopt the reading that seems most appropriate to the final form of the story. Practically all of these passages -- there are a good many of them -- occur in Book I.
Readers who know the details of Mark's life will have discovered that some of them are reproduced in "The Great Dark." For instance, Mark twice crossed the Atlantic in the Batavia, once alone and once with his family, and when Henry reminds Alice that she was attended during an illness by the author of Rab and His Friends all the details he mentions are taken from Mark's experience. In the notes there are occasional hints of a deliberate intention to make the story represent his own life. Most of them are not developed in the story, and those which are developed are modified so much that one may safely say he abandoned the plan. Nevertheless both the difficulty he had writing
"The Great Dark" and the obstinacy with which he kept coming back to it suggest that it meant more to him than a mere story, that its basic fantasies were extremely important to him. I have pointed out that he was making toward The Mysterious Stranger, a more successful treatment of the same themes, but it is also true that he was here expressing the dread and sorrow of the preceding six years of his life. "The Great Dark" is therefore important in his artistic biography.
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Table of Contents
BOOK II
CHAPTER I