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.
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