Mark of Satan

I like how the author makes a contrast between the two main characters of the story, Flashman and Thelma. On the one hand, Thelma is just willing to help. She is a witness of God’s love and her mission is to bring this love to everyone. She is a figure of innocence; she doesn’t even notice Flasman’s bad intentions. “Another woman would have been aware of Flash’s calculating eyes on her like ants swarming over sugar, but not this impassioned missionary for the Church of the Holy Witness.” She wants to save Flash’s soul by letting him feel loved and important. “He tried not to show his impatience with Thelma, fixing instead on the amazing fact of her: a woman not known to him an hour before, now sitting less than a yard away addressing him as if, out of all of the universe, he mattered.”

On the other hand, Flashman is having an inner struggle. He wants to pay attention to Thelma but for some reason, it is very difficult for him to do this. “The man who called himself Flash was making every effort to listen.” He hears some voices on the inside that tell him to do good or bad things. “Offer them drinks, lemonade, but no, he was thinking, no.” “Don’t flatter yourself you matter enough even to be grieved! Asshole!”

I also noticed that the author stresses on the word “death” by writing it several times and in italics. “The Holy Witness records, ‘He that overcometh shall not be hurt by the second death.’ As abruptly as she’d begun, the child ceased, her mouth going slack on the word death”, “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there will be no more death. Maybe it was so? So simple? No more death”, “Her voice rose jubilantly on the word death”. I don’t really understand what the child means when she speaks about this second death, but it seems like what the missionaries want to do is to give Flashman the hope of having his soul saved and being immortal in some way. By receiving a message of love and hope, Flashman seems to have realized that life is worth living. At the end of the story, Harvey has finally gained full control of himself, so we can say that the missionaries were a positive influence to him. The change in Harvey is revealed by his eyes. When Harvey raised his eyes to his sister’s, “he did not appear to be drunk or drugged; his eyes were terribly bloodshot, as if he’d had one of his crying jags, but his manner was unnervingly composed”, he had a “look of maddening calm” a “blasted sober look in his eyes she hadn’t seen in twelve years”.

There is a contrast between Flashman and Thelma but there is also a contrast inside Flashman himself. The story refers to Flasman’s “things” coming out as if he couldn’t control them. “Hadn’t he wakened in the night to a pounding heart and a taste of bile with the premonition that something, one of his things, was to happen soon?” and also “He was frightened of the possibility of one of his things veering out of his control, for in the past when this had happened the consequences were always very bad. For him as for others.” It seems like he often loses control of his actions because of drugs’ influence. What does “one of his things” refer to?

To answer Jason’s question, I think that it is probable that Harvey lied to the missionaries about being orphan just to inspire them pity, which wouldn’t be surprising since he also lied about his name. We could think that he is lying because he exaggerates a lot by saying “I was an orphan discarded at birth, set out with the trash. There’s a multitude of us scorned by man and God. What happened to me before the age of twelve is lost to me. Just a whirlwind. A whirlpool of oblivion.” Maybe he just wants to show how miserable his life is, he wants the missionary to realize that life is unfair for some people and to make her see this he has to exaggerate. “If it was a cruel mother, which I don’t contest, it was a cruel God guiding her hand, Thelma – wasn’t it?”, “Our Savior? Who says? On my trash heap I looked up, and He looked down, and He said, Fuck you, kid. Life is unfair.” He wants to explain why he has “lost contact” with God over the years but apparently, it’s not true that he was an orphan discarded at birth since his sister says that “by accident of birth they’d shared a household with two hapless adults who were their parents”.