SOURCE: "Mark Twain and the Dark Angel," in The Midwest Quarterly, Vol. VIII, No. 2, January, 1967, pp. 181-97.

In the following essay, Dennis discusses Mark Twain's handling of death in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and in his unfinished "The Great Dark. "

The confrontation with death, the Dark Angel, is a recurring thematic element in Mark Twain's writtings, from the rhetorical refrain of "Is he dead?" which punctures the narratives of the native guides in The Innocents Abroad to the specter of the spider-squid which lurks in the waters of "The Great Dark," the incomplete manuscript Bernard DeVoto includes in Letters From the Earth. Sometimes the confrontations are frankly autobiographical, sometimes they are elaborations of incidents Twain has merely read or heard about, and sometimes they are purely imaginative, but regardless of their genesis, each represents an earnest attempt to place the fact of death in a tenable perspective...