Mark Twain, in The War-Prayer, portrays very simplistically how the wish for one’s victory is actually in a way the desire for the disaster of others who stand against the side. The stranger expresses the rationality which is ignored by the people who are only concerned about their prayer to the Almighty for the victory. The irony reaches its transcendental dais when at the end it is declared that the stranger was actually “a lunatic” and “there was no sense” in the things he said. Twain has also utilized this craft in other literary works penned by him. Similarly in Pudd’nhead Wilson, the dwellers of the town fail to comprehend the ironic joke of Wilson and he is tagged wrongly for the many next years. Mark Twain has previously portrayed Huck’s failure to comprehend that the selfless act has not made him get condemned to hell. Thus in Huckleberry Finn too the use of irony is conspicuous. Thus, throughout his glorious days of writing the author employed this device in his works and thus accentuated the affect.
In The War-Prayer, the family members of all the people joining war cheer them from their heart and bask in the pride of the act of paramount valor. Those who do not have a male member who could join the war express grief over the haplessness. The community comes together at a church to pray to God for the success in the war. However, the omnipotent ritual is impeded as a man steps up to opine that the people should refrain from going into war being governed by pride and blind faith. The man goes on to explain that the people should understand the gory truth of the war and they all need to consider the facts and the impending consequences before joining the act mass destruction and jeopardy. They should be guided by argument and not blind faith. As a result, in their dreadful fever, they all take this man to be a lunatic.
Thus, Mark Twain employs the rhetoric device quietly unsubtly in this piece. Irony is dualistic in nature and it implies one thing while it points to something else. The War-Prayer was published posthumously as he had feared that the reaction to the work would hinder his career as a writer and he would be ostracized by the society. His opinion is voiced through the words of a mysterious stranger whose words are deciphered by the sensitive reader, while those who gauge the literal meaning fail to comprehend the semantic superstructure which aims to bash the imperialist system and uproot it from the roots. In the age of naturalism, it was believed by Mark Twain that the masses had turned a blind eye to the inevitable facts which loomed over the society or they were mentally conditioned by the system to be unable to gauge the matters correctly from a subjective and comprehensive perspective.
His subject actually attains timeless universality in the context of human civilization and renders sheer quintessence to the literary work. Warfare is still carried out by the nations which enjoy the powerful positions in the hierarchical power-structure of world politics and economy. These wars are raged even today in the name of emancipation and betterment of human communities. However, in stark contrast to the public claims, these wars lead to loss of innumerable innocent lives which have nothing to do with oppression and are actually the ones whom the powers had previously claimed to emancipate.
The nation state has always portrayed the war in the light of jingoism and has placed the soldiers in pedestals too high for them to comprehend the reality of the ground beneath where lie gazillion dead bodies which have faced the brutal brunt of the war and have succumbed to the baleful clutches of fate. Yet, the triumph is too enchanting to make the act of destruction and inhumanity visible to the rational self of the human race. History bears the testimony to the garb of religion which blinds thousands with the mist of the holy crusade against the antagonists. Innumerable people march on to the battlefield fully oblivious of the wrath which their muscular strength will bring upon the weak. In an ominous act of mass fanaticism, warfare employs its inescapable scythe on the enemy and also the innocent lives which have nothing whatsoever to do with war and politics. Even the triumphant side loses thousands in the battlefield, but goes on to glorify their demise in the name of the hollow valor and patriotism which is nothing but a veil to cover the unparalleled brutality of war and the colossal massacre.
In reality, the word patriotism meant the enhancement of the national boundaries and the plunder for the forces at helm of nation state. Bizarrely, the detractors of war took the word as the perfect advocacy of the omnipotent right to self-determinism. Hence, Mark Twain treads on the path of dualism to describe the occurrence of war and thereby succeeds in the quest to converse his opinion through the conspicuous irony.
A vehement opposition was something the author could not stop himself from indulging in. He employs his pen to bring out the irony of human existence and the sheer plight of the masses which succumb in front of the heartless fury of war. However, the man penned at the end that there was “no sense in what he was speaking” and indeed that would have been the general reaction of the people as they could hardly have viewed the matter with their subjective individuality and rationality. Years after the stalwart has penned The War-Prayer, his work seems to be the most relevant ironic commentary on the actions of human nature which have daunted human history making the ‘sons of nations’ engage in manslaughter and plunder in the name of establishing the omnipotence of the nation state defying the fundamental conscientiousness attributed to human kind.
The story is a scathing attack on the two biggest dogmas which shroud human lives. The author shakes the pillars of religion and patriotism from the roots and makes the avid reader mull over the institutional fallibility. The two institutions and their intertwined relationship in blinding the population have been put under the limelight to be exposed to one and all. The matrix within which the embodied mind resides and thereby fails to comprehend the basic facts which ought to be given paramount importance has been laid bare, with the story endeavoring to enlighten the individual to think rationally and not get swayed by the dogma.
The prayers to God aim at the victory in war, but what goes unsaid in the prayer is the defeat and obvious destruction of the enemy. Humans are thus stripped of humanity and their humane self is taken over by futile hostility among communities. Benedict Anderson in his pivotal book, Imagined Communities, opines that the nation states are imagined communities which are constructed on the basis of culture and religion. But, the demarcation also means that human kind is disintegrated into communities and thereby the clashes find their inception owing to the vested interests of the governmental institutions which have no other intention but the expansion of its forces and power.
Mark Twain’s story is thus immortalized in the pages of the history of English Literature and his commentary serves as a coruscating literary work which evokes the reader’s rationality and tears the veil which has kept the individual in the darkness of ritualistic and jingoistic dogma.
Works Cited
Baender, Paul. “Alias Macfarlane: A Revision of Mark Twain Biography.” American Literature
8.2 (May 1966): 187-97. Print.
Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Print.
Gribben, Alan. “The Importance of Mark Twain.” American Quarterly 37.1 (Spring 1985): 30-
49. Print.
