Mark Twain's Arousal of Curiosity in "A Curious Experience"

"You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus."

—Mark Twain¹

Mark Twain's short story "A Curious Experience" (1881) has been called directionless, overdone, ineffective, artless, pedestrian, and critically meritless, among other unkind terms, but the story is deliberately deceptive.² It is, in fact, partly about deception, largely about ways in which people deceive themselves and, often unintentionally, through that self-deception, deceive others, who in turn fool themselves and still others. Twain's first appearance in Century, "A Curious Experience" concerns the use and abuse of imagination as it contrasts excessive and barren imaginative faculties and demonstrates the ways that both can be misled. While doing so, this story about storytelling—like "Jim Blaine and His Grandfather's Old Ram," "Story without an Ending," and "A Medieval Romance"—subtly hoaxes both its characters and readers.

It contains other familiar Twainian themes, such as the problems of romance fiction and dream-reality conflicts, and another clever use of a favorite device, the framework. One objective of the story is an examination of the nature of truth. This examination redefines banality and unoriginality in storytelling and comments upon creativity and critical acumen. The former two become confused with freshness and originality. The acumen is tested as the story leads and misleads those seeking hints and following clues to its meanings. Those most fooled may be those readers such as critics, who—like the Major in the story—are most sure they know character and understand what is happening and where they (and the characters) are going. Before formalism, Mark Twain writes an anti-formalist story. Before postmodernism and deconstructionism, he ignores frames to pull readers into a story not only deconstructing itself but notions of realism as well.

The Major, with a limited imagination and less insight, encounters Robert Wicklow, a boy with an active one and an ability to merge any notion given him into it. Enraptured by the boy's history as a Southerner orphaned because of his Union loyalties, the Major in effect adopts and finds a military position as drummer-boy for the underage lad but, disturbed by reports of strange behavior, launches an investigation, soon believing him to be a spy. These extreme shifts continue as Wicklow's actions and explanations increase fears of conspiracy, and circumstances intensify the situation, only to fade to insignificance at his discovery as a runaway, a local preacher's son who had never been South or anywhere else except in his mind, whence also his spy adventures. The Major, the interior narrator with a straightforward military mind, frequently tells M.T., the outside narrator trying to report these events, to ignore details, but he becomes detail-entangled and loses focus. The Major goes the wrong direction, following certain details of Wicklow's stories, seeking nostalgia in the first and spy plots in later ones. The Major's curiosity, with the reader's, increases, but his perceptiveness does not. Thinking he has or can find the truth, he grasps only part, led astray by his own interests. But references to truth and partial truth abound, from the first page until the last, in allusions to history, lies, and rumors and in phrases such as "suggestive facts," "as nearly as I can recall," "just as he told it," "not certain," "the truth is," "indorsement of . . . rumors," "lay the facts," "the truth—the whole truth," "He told that lie with [a] sincere . . . countenance," "you must tell me the truth," "I do not know," "I am telling the truth," "not a shade's divergence from the exact truth," "a detailed history," "all denied his facts," "as true as gospel," "I knew just enough," "it was real to him," and "the main facts."³ The suggestion is that full truth is not knowable. The actions of the Major and others actually support Wicklow's fantasies. They contribute to their own deception.

"A Curious Experience" has been much misunderstood and misinterpreted on the rare occasions it has been discussed. The MLA Bibliography lists no articles devoted to it published in the past...