The Vision of the Other in Mark Twain's 'War-Prayer'

Abstract

New Perspectives on “The War-Prayer” Essays on “The War-Prayer” The Vision of the Other in Mark Twain’s “War-Prayer” Martin ZEHR Mark Twain’s ofcial biography, published two years after his death, contains his cold assertion, in reference to “The War-Prayer,” that “. . . only dead men can tell the truth in this world” (Paine 1234). This may certainly have been his belief at the time of the assess- ment, but for the reader of Twain’s works it is evident that he was capable of his share of truth-telling throughout his career, or at least providing us with sufciently convincing glimpses of ourselves, through his depiction of real or  ctitious characters, to draw us in and capture our attention. It is indeed, this ability, to see ourselves, through others, and, just as importantly, in others, that renders his work, whether categorized as humor- ous, ironic, satirical, or polemical, easily accessible to the reader who ventures to take the journey. As Twain himself describes the inuence of literal, as well as  gurative, travel, “It liberalizes the Vandal to travel—you never saw a bigoted, opinionated, stubborn, nar- row-minded, self-conceited, almighty mean man in your life but he had stuck in one place since he was born. . .” (Fatout 36). While Twain certainly, from a literal standpoint, was the most-traveled author of his generation, it is critical to observe that his travels, in a more literary sense, include the ability to transform his perspective to that of the Other and, ultimately, to conclude that the distinction between himself and the Other is often a matter of unexamined habit or convenience. In “The War-Prayer,” Twain’s mysterious stranger asks and answers the rhetorical question “Is it one prayer? No, it is two—one uttered, the other not,” as a means of lead- ing the reader to the vision of the other. This is an Other, including the members of the congregation, who stands to experience soldiers torn “to bloody shreds” covering “smiling  elds with the pale forms of their patriot dead,” hearing “shrieks of their wounded, writh- ing in pain,” or seeing “humble homes” wasted “with a hurricane of  re, . . . the hearts of . . . unoffending widows with unavailing grief, . . . the wastes of their desolated land.” In the jingoistic fervor of the turn of the last century, during which the United States brutally suppressed the independence movement led by Aguinaldo in the Philippines in the wake of the Spanish-American War and assisted in the re-establishment of European hegemony over the coastal regions of China following the Boxer rebellion, Twain was not reticent in expressing his revulsion towards his country’s policies. In “The War-Prayer,” a product of this revulsion, he also attempts to unmask the denial of the other, disguised in the “holy