An examination of the persistent death motif in Twain's literature reveals a strong fusion of his art, personal experience and philosophical conclusions. Death imagery dramatizes Twain's pessimistic view of an estranged humanity existing without purpose or direction in an incomprehensible universe. Twain shows in his works that religious and social beliefs only obscure the fact that the meaning of death is beyond man's intellectual and perceptual powers. In Twain's view the only certainty about death is that it is a release from the preordained tragedies of existence. Illusions, primordial terrors, and mystifying dreams shape man's disordered reality, Twain concludes, and therefore death is as meaningless as life.

The purposes of this study were to formulate a definition of the "bob-wheel" stanza in which a number of Middle English and Middle Scots poems were written, to inventory and describe these works, with special attention to the structure of individual stanzas, to identify the genres, the periods, and the dialects in which they were written, and to trace their origin and development between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. The dissertation includes a general introduction of the topic, chapters on the influence of Latin and Romance stanzaic structure, a chronological survey of the bob-wheel poems, and a conclusion in which theories concerning the origins, development, and decline of the form are discussed.