Twain's witty vision of what heaven "is really like" is told from the
point of view of the recently deceased Captain Stormfield. In a folksy
narration peppered with sailor's jargon, the amiable, altogether
down-to-earth merchant marine describes a series of amusingly
disconcerting revelations about the next world.
Sitting on a cloud strumming a harp all day turns out to be insufferably
boring; being eternally youthful also has its drawbacks when the captain
finds himself not mixing well with a crowd of insipid teenagers; and
Native Americans so outnumber whites in the North American district of
Paradise that the average white Anglo-Saxon male has trouble finding
someone to talk to. In fact the outlandish dimensions and
characteristics of heaven utterly explode every human conception.
This funny, satirical spoof on human pretensions about the importance of
our species in the grand scheme of things was the last published work by
Mark Twain. The main character and plot were inspired by the dream of an
actual sea captain whom Twain had known. Published at the beginning of
the 20th century, when astronomy had just begun to reveal the huge
expanse of outer space and traditional religious concepts of our place
in the universe had become inadequate, Twain's humorous vision of the
afterlife seems to reflect the new scientific awareness of the awesome
cosmos that confronts us and the feelings of insignificance that this
discovery produced.
Two years after publication of this "extract," originally planned as a
six-chapter book, Twain himself shipped off to follow in Captain
Stormfield's wake.
