Question

Critical appreciation of the story how it happened by

a.c doyle

Answer 1

want to increase point ....sorry

Answer 2

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a convinced believer in spiritualism, which is based on the belief that human souls live on after death and that living persons can communicate with them, usually through "mediums." It is often overlooked that Doyle begins this story with the following brief explanation:

She was a writing medium. This what she wrote:--

Then the story immediately becomes a first-person narrative by a wealthy country gentleman who loses control of his car and after a harrowing drive down a winding road is killed in a smash-up in front of his home. The narrator is already dead when he is telling this story through the medium, but the reader does not fully realize this until the end, when the narrator meets his old friend Stanley who died during the Boer War.

"Stanley!" I cried, and the words seemed to choke my throat--"Stanley, you are dead."

He looked at me with the same old gentle, wistful smile.

"So are you," he answered.

The excitement of the wild ride down the hill makes the reader forget that the story is being narrated through a so-called "writing medium," so it will come as a shock to realize that the narrator is fully conscious but has joined the invisible ranks of the dead.

Doyle sincerely believed in life after death and in the possibility of communicating with the dead through spiritualist mediums. He lost his beloved son during World War I, and this experience had a lasting effect on his mind. The main theme of his short story "How It Happened" therefore would appear to be that human souls survive after death.