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.