Mrs. McWilliams and the Lightning by Mark Twain : A Commentary

Résumé du document

The story apparently takes place in a carriage of a train and it is told by a certain Mr. McWilliams to the listener, who is in fact re-telling and transmitting Mr. McWilliams words. We have only a part of his so called 'talk', which actually resembles more a tall-tale than anything else and which has already been going on for a while. The narrator announces what he is going to talk about from the very beginning, 'the fear of lightning is one of the most distressing infirmities a human being can be afflicted with' he says. The narrator is apparently sharing a personal experience connected with lightning. The basic purpose of the story is to create humour by recounting in an anecdotal way, the events of one night when the wife of the narrator, Mrs. McWilliams, was woken up by a thunderstorm and hid from it in a closet. By the end of the story it turns out that the noise was actually coming from a canon and not from lightning.

Extraits

[...] Mark Twain: Comprehensive Research and Study Guide, Chelsea House Publications Twain, Mark. [...]

[...] Its use is understandable if we are acquainted with Mark Twain's views on the German language. He had always claimed that it is an “impossible” language and that we look at a German word from one side it looks like a railway on the other it gets narrower in the distance”. Here, the absurdity of the situation is stressed further by the fact that Mrs. Mc Williams is trying to read such a complicated book in German while she cannot possibly understand something far simpler than that the fact that wearing woollen clothes will not kill the person who is wearing them during a thunderstorm. [...]

[...] McWilliams thinks that Mortimer's swearing and his not saying his prayers regularly is the cause of the lightning and even the yellow fever. The more illogical and aberrant her statements are, the greater the incongruity of the conclusions made. We have, in this way, particularly exaggerated gravity of the circumstances for Mrs. McWilliams cannot be convinced in the opposite and cannot therefore stop fearing the lightning, and lastly, is not to go out of the closet until the end of the thunderstorm. [...]

[...] McWilliams waking up because Mrs. McWilliams calls him out of the boot-closet where she has hidden herself. Then, we have a series of dialogues between the two, Mrs. McWilliams giving orders to her husband about how to save himself from lightning while he tries to reason her. The second part of the story contains two passages in German which are used by Mrs. McWilliams to persuade her husband that he has to protect himself from lightning even inside the house. [...]

[...] McWilliams and a tremendous blast of thunder.]”) and resemble more stage directions than anything else. Actually, if we look at the story in this way, it can be very suitable for staging indeed. These comments are so brief and exact that their existence in normal speech or story-telling seems impossible. The language of the short story is very particular. We have many onomatopoeia which evoke some kind of situational humour and look more particularly like cartoon commentaries BOOM beroom-boom! boom! [...]