THE LAST DUTY and ALBERT SCHNELL’S DOWNFALL

This two-part story, The Last Duty (1893) and Albert Schnell’s Downfall (1895), an early work of John Henry Mackay, is influenced by the literary movement of naturalism, but remains uniquely Mackay. The central character Albert Schnell illustrates, in a negative way, Mackay’s philosophy of individualist anarchism, while remaining a genuine, recognizable human being, not a mere symbol. The first part, in a tour de force of writing, is a story without a plot — as Mackay tells us in its subtitle. It describes three days in the life of a man who, essentially, has no life. Yet Mackay makes us care for the hopeless little man. Indeed, there is no hope for him, as soon becomes clear in the second part of the story. Schnell has absorbed all the “virtues” of his hypocritical society, and they work against him. Ironically Schnell does know what he must do to resist his fate, but he is prevented by his own weakness and the power his illusory world has over him. His downfall becomes inevitable.