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The Invalid's Story Mark Twain Analysis

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Hollaway Chase Hollaway Hensley English 11/Fourth Period 05 March 2018 Part 12: Rough Draft #1 “The invalid's Story” Is a literary work of art. Mark Twain uses many literary devices. Including foreshadowing, humor, and personification. They are all used very often, and they are used in contrast and conjunction to make the story what it is, and to give the reader the intended reaction. Mark Twain is a very humorous author. He uses dark humor in several of his stories, and it tends to be the theme, author's style, and the most used literary device. In Mark Twain's short story “The Invalid's story” The reader is shown lots of dark morality. In David Gallons short Stories for Students literary analysis, he states “The narrator has many conversations with thompson, the expressman on the train, who ruminates about the inevitability of death itself”(Gallons 150). Morality is show in Mark Twain's short story “The Invalid's …show more content…

In “The Invalid's Story” Twain states “and soon I began to feel more and more uneasy every minute, for every minute that went by that odor thickened up the more” (Twain 1) Almost the whole story, the reader knows that the box in the cart in fact turned out to not be John Hackett, but instead a box of guns. And the smell is not Hacketts dead body, but instead the limburger cheese placed on top of the box of guns by the original intended carrier of the box of guns. “Twain uses foreshadowing to drastically change the tone of the story. As stated above, the reader did not know that the “corpse” was really a box of guns with really smelly cheese on top” (Gallons 151) The reader typically becomes very interested because of the foreshadowing showing the box does not contain what it is believed to in “The Invalid's story” Mark Twain. Not knowing the true contents of the box are what makes the reader so interested in it. It becomes a very important hook point for the story and pulls the reader

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