The Invalid's Story

The true nature of the “decaying corpse” in the story—a combination of a box of guns and some ripe cheese—suggests that death is both inevitable and unremarkable, and not something to be sentimental about. Twain is certainly poking fun at sentimental Victorian notions of death in the story, as he does in other works. For instance, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the character of Emmeline Grangerford embodies these notions as she writes maudlin poems based on obituaries and draws pictures with titles such as “Shall I Never See Thee More Alas.” In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the title character and his equally rascally friends—missing and presumed dead—attend their own funeral for the pleasure of hearing themselves praised lavishly.

In “The Invalid’s Story,” the narrator initially feels only depressed by the odor in the train car. He finds “something infinitely saddening” in the way his friend reminds him of death (Paragraph 2). His thoughts about his friend are mournful and decorous. Thompson, too, at first attributes only sorrowful notions toward what he thinks is the body, sitting silently with the narrator and then quoting scripture. As the story goes on, however, the stench in the car overpowers all sentimental feeling. To this end, the narrator’s choice of words to describe the smell is highly inventive: It is “evil and searching” (Paragraph 2), “just about suffocating” (Paragraph 20), and “sublime” and “rich” (Paragraph 40).

To emphasize the theme that mortality is not deserving of sentiment, the experience that the two characters have in the train car actually ruins their health and hastens their own deaths. The narrator begins by describing his former good health and promises to reveal how he lost it. Overcome by the smell in the car at one point, Thompson says, “I’m a-dying,” and just before the characters are removed from the train platform, he says it’s the “last trip” for himself and the narrator because they have been “pisoned” (poisoned) (Paragraph 43).

The frame story, in which the narrator describes his adventure two years later, drives home this reflection of the nature of mortality. The narrator begins the story by saying he has lost his health, and he ends it by saying it is his last trip and he is “on [his] way home to die” (Paragraph 44). Thus, a journey that was meant to carry the remains of a dead person to his resting place becomes, instead, a journey toward death for the living. Again, it is the true nature of the smell in the car—cheese—that deflates any poignancy readers might otherwise associate with the imminent death of a main character.

As a last consideration, the two actions that propel the events of the story suggest that death can also be very random. A young man, about whom readers know nothing, mistakenly affixes his address card to the box containing the corpse. Another man leaves the cheese in the express car. Death, variously symbolized by the corpse and the cheese’s smell, thus arrives where and when one least expects it.