Mark Twain's Satire Interpretation Of Man

Through his writing, Mark Twain presents a satirical interpretation of man. He pokes fun at the nonsensical and ironic things that men do, especially in their attempts to be better and better reach God. Twain draws men as beings who attempt lack a self-awareness to realize what they do is all in selfishness. In Letters written by Satan, Twain plays upon the fact that men follow the law of God because they are told to. They imagine a place of good faith and peace in a place after death, even though they don’t aspire to those things while alive. Twain points out that we go to church because we are told to, even when we don’t want to. We believe ourselves to be a creation of God, yet we do things that are supposedly not in favor in the eyes

He compares humans to machines, comparing our growth to their growth. He points out that Man does things due to an external force. We have no choice in why we do things or what drives us to do things. We react to a collection of ideas and events to form our “ideas” and thoughts. We do not have an original idea, we are machines who advance because the external force made us more advanced, such as a machine becomes more advanced because we force it to. Twain essentially states that we are just cogs in a larger scale machine. In addition, when we do something “selfless,” we are only doing so due to our comparing our own pain. For example, in a story, the young man defends humans by saying a man who is under a perilous journey sees a woman in her own peril and gives up his last bit of income. The young man defends Man by saying he is doing so out of “selflessness.” However, the older man fights back by saying the man helped the woman because of his own consciousness; that he empathized with the woman and didn’t want to feel bad for not helping. In the end, the old man robbed the younger man of his faith, ironically robbing the old man of his own peace of