The title How It Is suggests that an answer is being given to the question, "How is it in the world, in this human life of ours?" That interpretation seems the more certain because of the nature of the narrative. The nameless narrator tells how he moves painfully through a world of warm mud. We hear that he meets another like himself, tortures him, and then finds that his victim has moved away in the mud. The narrator proceeds to speculate at large upon life in the muddy world. He draws up theories about his own experience being only part of a series of similar encounters in the mud, where pairs of beings are continually meeting; where each one plays in turn the part of the torturer and the tortured; and where the transition is made by the victim of the encounter crawling away to find some one...