26 pages • 52 minutes read
Mark TwainThe Invalid's Story
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1874A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Fire
In the characters’ escalating attempts to overpower the smell of the cheese, Thompson purchases an odd assortment of items—chicken feathers, dried apples, leaf tobacco, rags, old shoes, sulphur, asefetida (an herb), and “one thing or another” (Paragraph 39)—and then sets them on fire. All would, presumably, have a strong odor when burned.
Twain frequently lampooned institutional Christianity in his work. In words intended for his autobiography, but suppressed by his family for many years, he described the religion as “bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing and predatory” and called it “a terrible religion.” The idea that Christianity has been corrupted by its gatekeepers is visible in “The Invalid’s Story,” particularly in this symbol. When viewing When viewing the story through this lens, the fire can be seen as a symbol of a ritual burnt sacrifice in the tradition of those in the Hebrew Bible. For example, Leviticus 6:8-13 gives specific instructions for how to conduct a burnt offering.
This offering, however, does not appease the vengeful spirit of what the two characters perceive as the decaying corpse. Instead, the original smell “stood up out of it just as sublime as ever” (Paragraph 40). The fire is the last straw that drives them to the freezing platform to stay, until they are dragged off “frozen and insensible” (Paragraph 44). Within the theme of corruption within the church, the fire suggests that rituals that once supported Christianity are now meaningless.
The Box of Guns
The choice of guns for the contents of the box that travels with the narrator is symbolically significant. Taking the place of a dead body are deadly objects, suggesting that the contents of the two white boxes are interchangeable.
The narrator himself seems to believe this. He reveals in the first paragraph that the box presumed to be the coffin instead contains guns, setting up a story that relies heavily on dramatic irony for humor. Yet he twice seems to forget what he knows to be in the box as he tells his story. He refers to it as “my coffin-box—I mean my box of guns” (Paragraph 2) and describes Thompson moving toward the “cof—gun box” (Paragraph 4).
The symbolism of the guns Illustrates The Nature of Mortality as something inevitable and not to be sentimentalized. If a dead body might just as well be a bunch of guns, it is nothing to weep over excessively. The way in which the boxes are switched at the railway station emphasizes this point. The narrator never imagines there could be two long, white pine boxes, and so he fastens his card marked with the name of the deceased friend’s father to the wrong box.
The Storm
The snowstorm that rages outside the train car symbolizes the tense situation within it and is often described in metaphorical ways. When natural elements, animals, or objects are given humanlike characteristics in a fictional work, it is called personification—thus the storm is as much a personified element as it is a symbol in “The Invalid’s Story.”
This use of personification underscores the theme of The Power of the Imagination. In the story, it is being outside in the freezing storm, not the stench inside the car, that causes the narrator’s decline in health. The narrator, however, tells the reader that he lost his health “through helping to take care of a box of guns” (Paragraph 1). The foul conditions inside the car are as deleterious to him as the storm outside.
The symbolism of the storm plays out in the arc of the story, as the growing smell in the train car causes the characters to increasingly expose themselves to the storm’s effects. First, after Thompson breaks a windowpane, the characters sniff the fresh, cold air for just a few moments at a time. Then the two characters are forced to escape to the platform to revive themselves; they acknowledge that they can’t “stay out there in that mad storm” and go back inside (Paragraph 33). After the attempt with the carbolic acid, they go “back and forth, freezing, and thawing, and stifling, by turns” (Paragraph 37). Ultimately, after Thompson builds his fire in the middle of the floor, they simply stay outside. Their false beliefs in the source of the stench leads to their downfall in the freezing weather.
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By Mark Twain
