I'm not sure the bones of this one hold together--the more highly moral someone is, the more their conscience grows large and noble and fair (and vice versa--the protagonist in this one, who has sullied himself with sin after sin and lives in self-loathing, is a low dwarf covered in green mould), but at the same time when he feels guilt (or more, shame--his aunt harping on him for smoking, e.g) his conscience gets "heavy" and dopey and when not, light as a feather?* Though the latter bit is obviously needed for the plot because the more the guy wants to strangle his conscience and rid himself of it for good, the less he can, and the more guilty and in irons he is, the more vulnerable the conscience. Which basically skyrockets us past a Freudian conception of superegoic injunction and right into a view of guilt as abjection very much in tune with our conceptions in this trauma-troubled age. And the ending is indeed so weird--all of a sudden we've skipped over multiple murders (what you might expect from a resentful dude who kills his conscience) to the cartoonish gothique of the protagonist sitting in his basement surrounded by cadavers trying to sell them to medical schools--so sudden, and so weird and twisted, that it points directly to Twain's great and grotesque cadaver obsession, and in that sense to his own guilt and shame (he witnessed his father's autopsy as a boy), and starts to act as a skeleton key to this element in his work.

* (actually, maybe it's the shame/guilt axis that's the answer to my thing here: a noble conscience is one that lives inside you and makes you feel bad when you should; a low one makes you seethe with resentment; but the noble person is less prone to being shamed from the outside, since they conscientiously try to be good and view themselves in proportion, whereas the one with the weak internal compass is more prone to shameful acts and attendant shame? I think that is it! Twain could have brought that out) ( )

One of Twain's darker stories (in a fashion, that is), in which a man is afforded the chance to confront his own conscience, a meeting which concludes in either a disastrous or wondrous fashion, depending on your point of view. Twain's musings always manage to expose the illogical nature of human behavior, and in this case it takes on an almost psychiatric angle, and features, in my opinion, one of his better short story "punchlines." ( )

FABULOUS!