The Exception or the Rule.

There are countless questions to be asked about the source and nature of how we internalize the principles of right and wrong from the day we are born. Every element of our being – from the skin on our bones to its nerves connecting to our brain – is constantly absorbing the sensations of our daily experiences and interpreting its meaning to make sense of our place in the world. But who gets to categorize the significance of those experiences? Who gets to decide what is valuable or not valuable to uphold in our standards? Is it not true that we often rely on such innate social values to shape our identities? Thus, are we left to critique the self or the society to make those distinctions?

            In Twain’s short story, “The Good Little Boy,” I feel that he means to expose the hypocrisy of “conventional education” through a character that aims to perfectly embody the figures within his Sunday-school books – a paradigm of moral teachings directed to impressionable youth. Here we get a boy who is perceived by his peers to be, “…so honest that he was simply ridiculous,” (67). He never lies, plays hooky, or disobeys his parents, “…even when his sober judgment told him it was the most profitable thing he could do,” he is self-assured to pursue these good deeds because his role models from his books did the same and for it, were respectively recognized and revered (67). This starts off as an admirable ambition for the young boy, however, he quickly finds that in reality, nothing plays out as smoothly for him as the way things do in his Sunday-school books.

            Before his own ill-fated death at the end of the story, there is a consistent foreshadowing that his heroes always died in the end of their stories as well – the only difference between them was that “…whatever this boy did he got into trouble. The very things the boys in the books got rewarded for turned out to be about the most unprofitable things he could invest in, ”(68). This leaves a hint of satirical reality for the reader to hold over the little good boy because this is life as we often experience it – good things happen to bad people while bad things happen to good people. On top of that, I think that Twain uses this boy’s drive for goodness to stress our consideration that when has any human being been able to avoid sinfulness without some adversity?

I believe that Twain is suggesting that the credibility of many religion’s and societies standards should be challenged because things are not as black and white as they are taught to be but shrouded by the unknown gray area that comes with the many unexpected and sometimes undeserved hurdles that life throws at us. These institutional standards do us a disadvantage by setting up such formulaic expectations that are supposed to equate a certain ending, when in truth, we barely have any control of what end we meet. Ironically, I think the boy’s tragic end is not so tragic in that he lived his life with the best of intentions just battered by misfortune like the rest of us are. His fate reflects how he is the rule to the human condition rather than the exception that he always perceived himself to be because he was blinded by a promising value that he was doomed to imperfectly fulfill.  

References:
Twain, Mark, and Charles Neider. The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain. New York: Bantam, 1981. Print.