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“This is the End.” “Wow.”: The Chronicle of Young Satan, Chapter 11 • The Devil According to Mark Twain • The Devil’s Details • Episode 712

“This is the End.” “Wow.”: The Chronicle of Young Satan, Chapter 11 • The Devil According to Mark Twain

Chapter eleven of The Chronicle of Young Satan is the last chapter Mark Twain wrote — or rather, the last one he started. The manuscript cuts off in the middle of a magic trick, mid-scene, in a nobleman’s hall in India, with Satan in the process of exposing a juggler’s confederate. That’s where the actual Twain ends. What follows — the goodbye, the speech, the ending that has defined The Mysterious Stranger for over a century — is Paine and Duneka’s addition, taken from a different, more complete manuscript called No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, where it belongs to a different story with a different character and actually earns its place.

We read it anyway. Satan has come to say goodbye — he has investigations in other corners of the universe that will take longer than Theodore can wait. They have comraded long together, he says, and it has been pleasant. Theodore asks if they’ll meet in another life. There is no other, Satan says. And then comes the speech: life is only a vision, a dream. Nothing exists — not God, not the universe, not the stars, not Theodore. Empty space, and you. And you are but a thought. A vagrant thought. A useless thought. A god who could make good children as easily as bad yet preferred bad ones. Who mouths mercy and invented hell. It is all a dream and you are the dreamer. He vanished and Theodore knew it was true.

We sit with what this ending was meant for, whether our Satan in the Chronicle was heading somewhere different, and what Twain — who had faith even in his darkest years — was actually trying to say.

The Devil is in the details. 
Join Lester Ryan Clark and Kynan Dias for a comedic deep dive into the history of the ultimate villain, tracking his journey through theology, Paradise Lost, and modern cinema.”