Mark Twain’s short story “The Invalid’s Story,” published in his 1882 collection The Stolen White Elephant, Etc., is a tall tale involving a mix-up between a coffin and a box full of guns. Traveling on a train with what he believes to be the coffin, the first-person narrator mistakes the odor of pungent cheese for that of the decaying corpse. Disparaged by critics for its crudeness at its time of publication, the story deals with themes like The Nature of Mortality and The Power of the Imagination.

Twain, the pen name of writer Samuel L. Clemens, is best known for his 19th-century novels The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, celebrated for their humor, critiques of social mores, and use of the vernacular. While “The Invalid’s Story” has all those elements, it is further characterized by the author’s “frontier” humor style of exaggeration and earthiness.

This guide is based on the copy of the text published by Brookdale Community College of Monmouth County, New Jersey.

Before the unnamed narrator launches into his tale, he notes he is afflicted with an illness that makes him appear “sixty and married” (Paragraph 1), although he is only 41. He attributes this infirmity to a train journey he took two years before and the pine box he traveled with on the trip. While his health decline was caused by his belief that the box contained a ripe corpse, he acknowledges now that it was really filled with rifles.

Two years ago, the narrator states, he returned (from parts unknown) to his home in Cleveland, Ohio, to discover his dear friend, John B. Hackett, had died the day before. Determined to honor his friend’s last wish that his remains be returned to his parents in Wisconsin, the narrator departed again for the train station. After locating a long, white box matching the description of Hackett’s coffin, he tacked a card with the Wisconsin address on the box—“Deacon Levi Hackett, Bethlehem, Wisconsin” (Paragraph 2)—and made sure it was stowed in the express car, which held cargo and baggage.

The narrator then ran off to purchase food and cigars for the train ride. When he returned, he saw a man with the white box, tacking a Peoria, Illinois, address to it. Astonished, the narrator hurried to the express car and was relieved to see his own identical box where he had left it. At this point, the narrator parenthetically notes that the boxes have been wrongly identified: the one containing Hackett was going to Peoria, while the one he was transporting contained rifles meant for a rifle company.

The narrator settled himself into the express car in the company of the expressman (the person in charge of safe delivery of the cargo). His name was Thompson, a hearty man of about 50. A stranger quickly darted in and out of the car, leaving a parcel on top of the pine box. Once again, the narrator notes what he didn’t know at the time, namely that inside the stranger’s parcel was a block of “peculiarly mature and capable” (Paragraph 2) Limburger cheese.

As a wild snowstorm raged outside, Thompson bustled around the train car while humming “Sweet By and By,” and the train started its westward trek. The narrator soon detected an “evil and searching odor” (Paragraph 2) creeping about the car, but Thompson didn’t seem to notice. While Thompson lit a fire in the stove and sealed up cracks in the car, the narrator grew increasingly uneasy. As the car became warm, the smell intensified and the humming stopped. Thompson pointed at the pine box, declaring that the narrator’s friend was “pretty ripe” (Paragraph 7).

After a few awkward minutes, Thompson tried to put a positive spin on the stench. He told the narrator that, in the past, he had transported coffins and feared the individuals inside would suddenly sit up—not dead, but in a trance. He assured the narrator that his fetid friend “ain’t in no trance” (Paragraph 9).

Thompson then attempted to dignify the situation by referencing the Bible, saying, “Man that is born of woman is of few days and far between” (Paragraph 11, quoting Job 14:1), but the smell interrupted him. He broke a windowpane, and as the two took turns gulping fresh air, Thompson asked how long the narrator’s friend had been dead. The narrator, feeling compelled to give an answer commensurate with the stink, replied, “Two or three days” (Paragraph 17). However, Thompson apparently considered this a gross under-estimate, as he then dispensed his thoughts on the importance of timely burials.

The smell soon became smothering. After Thompson’s face turned gray, the narrator suggested they smoke cigars to create a more pleasing aroma. However, this seemed to only strengthen the foul smell from the box; Thompson concluded that the cigar smog seemed to “stir up” the corpse’s spirit of competition (Paragraph 26). The narrator remarked that Thompson used various military and civil titles when referring to their deceased traveling companion, and as the latter’s pungency grew, Thompson promoted his rank, giving him “a bigger title” (Paragraph 27).

After trying to move the box to the other end of the car without success, Thompson and the narrator burst out the door onto the car’s platform, gasping. Thompson concluded that they shouldn’t try to move the corpse again, because he “holds all the trumps” (Paragraph 32). Soon, the frigid weather forced them back inside the sour atmosphere of the car, so they took turns breathing near the broken window until the train made a brief stop.

At the station, Thompson exited the car and returned with carbolic acid, an antiseptic. Congratulating himself on countering the offensive body with stuff “that’ll take the tuck out of him” (Paragraph 34), Thompson sprinkled the acid everywhere. However, the smell of the acid mixed with the odor of the cheese. It was impossible to remain inside the car, so Thompson and the narrator spent the following hour stepping from the suffocating interior onto the freezing platform and back again.

When the train stopped again, Thompson bought a bizarre assortment of items—chicken feathers, dried apples, tobacco, rags, old shoes, sulfur, and asafetida (a powdered spice)—which he piled on an iron sheet and ignited in a final attempt to rout the odor. Nevertheless, once again, the stench from the box rose above all the others, and the two choking men were driven back out onto the platform, defeated. Thompson worried that their extended exposure to the winter weather could result in typhoid fever. At the next station, they were removed from the platform, “frozen and insensible” (Paragraph 44), and the narrator succumbed to a fever for the next three weeks.

Although the fever subsided, and the narrator eventually learned they shared the train car with only a “harmless box of rifles and a lot of innocent cheese” (Paragraph 44), he says now that it’s too late. His health has been entirely undone by the work of his imagination. Two years after that fateful train ride, he concludes that “neither Bermuda nor any other land” can restore his health (Paragraph 44), and he resigns himself to imminent death.