On a curious dream.

A Curious Dream
- Mark Twain

In reading this story I couldn't quite find much irony but I feel it is riddled with satire. I feel like I have to stretch to find irony but I do feel like I am missing points in the story that would enlighten my understanding.

The last three paragraphs hold much of the gravity of the story. The narrator wishes to publish his grim and enlightening encounter and speaks of this to a "shrouded wanderer" who in return says:

"Do not let that disturb you. The community that can stand such graveyards as those we are emigrating from can stand anything a body can say about the neglected and forsaken dead that lie in them."

The narrator then awakes with this paragraph:

At that very moment a cock crowed, and the weird procession vanished and left not a shred or a bone behind. I awoke, and found myself lying with my head out of the bed and "sagging" downward considerably--a position favorable to dreaming dreams with morals in them, maybe, but not poetry.

This is the most confusing paragraph for me. I do not understand exactly what he means with the last sentence. I gathered the shrouded wanderer was speaking of the injustice the dead often face and the lack of respect for those who have past in regards to the remains and the grounds they rest in; the last sentence, however, produced a very confusing interpretation of what the author was trying to say. While the lack of respect for the dead spoken of is obvious and easily observed I feel it may be too obvious and that I have only a partial understanding.

I really enjoyed this story by Twain. His consistent articulation of artistic acumen kept my fascination and attention. It wasn't only his phantasmal syntax that kept me involved in the story but I kept trying to answer "what is this trying to tell me" but it wasn't coming very clearly to me. This vague understanding of the moral of the story has kept me wondering.

As stated before I feel that it must be a satirical piece on how poor our veneration is for the dead. Any other ideas on the meaning or importance of the last paragraph would be appreciated and helpful. I truly like this story and want to understand it more than I do so hopefully either monotonous reading of the curious anecdote or outside explanation will help.

Death of a Narrator

The Invalids Story
- Mark Twain

The narrator is dead. I was was unsure of what I had read
when I finished the story so I went back to the beginning for a
simple reference of how the story began. I read this:

I seem sixty and marriedd,
but these effects are due to my
condition and suffering,
for I am a bachelor, and only
fourty-one. It will be hard for you
to believe that I,
who am now but a shadow...
[ this last line above is an allusion to a narative phantasma; who has not
stopped counting the years as they pass. He still considers himself a bachelor of sorts that is only of the age forty-one but this is what I see as Twains humor shinning through.]

The narrator speaks of his death in its entirety in the last paragraph and speaks
of how he will be dead and that nothing throughout the cosmics can bring him back. So reading the first paragraph again could only be understood as him being a true phantom. He speaks of his death but then is speaking in past tense thorught the first paragraphs entirety. The dramatic irony used in the story is twisted in that the audience is ignorant of the narrators death but the
story-teller would have to know what he was - a ghost; the audience is not privy enough to know what the narrator clearly does. This story is made entertaining through
the twist on dramatic irony coupled with articulate story telling.


I really like this story because it gives the reader the opportunity to think a bit. I dont find it a stretch to find agreeable in view of Twains various ghost stories such as "a curious dream" and "a ghost story", both in which the dead communicate with the living.