Simplified text of Mark Twain: Should there be such a comma in this sentence?

Question

The sentences below are from a simplified text of the short story "Luck" by Mark Twain.

And I've found two different versions of the simplified text on Google, with or without a comma:

Version 1:The hundreds of eyes watching him, the worship of so many people did not seem to make any difference to him.

Version 2:The hundreds of eyes watching him, the worship of so many people**,** did not seem to make any difference to him.

It seems, by my lights, that the second version with a comma is grammatically more understandable. The comma makes it clear that there are 2 subjects in this sentence. Anyway, since I don't have the book and I am not a native speaker, I don't know which is the original sentence or correct version.

Should there be such a comma in this sentence? Why?

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Added Note: the original sentence is

It was food and drink to me to look, and look, and look at that demigod; scanning, searching, noting: the quietness, the reserve, the noble gravity of his countenance; the simple honesty that expressed itself all over him; the sweet unconsciousness of his greatness--unconsciousness of the hundreds of admiring eyes fastened upon him, unconsciousness of the deep, loving, sincere worship welling out of the breasts of those people and flowing toward him.

Source: Twain, Mark. "Luck." Merry Tales. New York: Charles L. Webster & Co. 1892. Pages 66-67. Web.

Answer 1

The worship of so many people can be seen as a nonessential appositive phrase, and the link given in pyobum's answer supplies one reason for setting it off with commas.

It can also be seen as not being an appositive because we can reasonably see it as an element in addition to "the eyes" instead of a repetition of it.

Comma usage, like much else in grammar, can be a very messy business. I am quite sure that one could find authoritative sources giving rules saying the comma should be there, shouldn't be there, or is optional.

I use my 45 years of heavy reading as a guide in this case, to say that I'm quite sure that it's optional and that most experienced native speakers would prefer it there. But I don't think anyone can say that either choice is better.

English learners will, in most cases, best learn how such a choice affects a reader's experience by involvement with the language and by discussing with people how they think and feel when reading 1 compared to 2.

In brief, the comma probably helps me as a reader to group together the material that comes before the predicate slightly faster or surer than I would without it. In this example, if I read version 2 with no comma, it would cost me very little time and effort to make the same decision, but I believe that different words set in the same (or a similar) grammatical pattern would be more confusing or unnecessarily demanding if the comma was not there to guide me in this grouping or analyitic function.

Consider the following:

A. The taste of an apple, the sound of paper being torn, such things and their description in words are the concern of the poet.

B. The taste of an apple, the sound of paper being torn such things and their description in words are the concern of the poet.

In that sentence, most or many readers would need to pause at the junction of torn and such to determine whether such begins a new conceptual element, or continues to give information about paper or tearing.

I hope that this alternative kind of response is helpful to you or to others.

Answer 2

The comma is necessary.

The worship of so many people is an appositive, re-describing the hundreds of eyes watching him. You could also punctuate it with dashes:

The hundreds of eyes watching him—the worship of so many people—did not seem to make any difference to him.

I like your interpretation that the sentence has two (equivalent) subjects. The traditional parsing is that the hundreds of eyes watching him is the subject, and the appositive further asserts that the hundreds of eyes watching him are the worship of so many people. But of course, it works out the same whether you say that the sentence has two equivalent subjects, or one subject described twice. The main thing to understand is that the sentence is equating the hundreds of eyes watching him and the worship of so many people.

Either way you parse it, the closing comma (or the closing dash) is necessary to indicate that sentence is done with the re-description of the subject and ready to get on with something else. In speech, you would indicate the same thing with a change of pitch and/or a caesura.

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If you leave out the second comma, the sentence still makes grammatical sense, but it no longer carries the intended meaning. The meaning without the comma is the same as:

Because of the hundreds of eyes watching him, the worship of so many people did not seem to make any difference to him.

or:

In the situation where the hundreds of eyes were watching him, the worship of so many people did not seem to make any difference to him; in other situations, the worship of so many people probably would make a difference to him.

The part before the comma (in your Version 1) is called an “absolute construction”. In an absolute construction you can do pretty much anything, because it’s not grammatically joined to the rest of the sentence. It’s not equated with anything in the sentence, and it doesn’t modify anything in the sentence the way, say, a participle phrase does (though it can modify the sentence as a whole, like a huge adverb). Usually an absolute construction describes something relevant about the situation in which the main part of the sentence occurred, such as enabling it or explaining it. The exact form of relevance has to be inferred from the meanings of the words; the grammar doesn’t specify it.

But as Twain’s original sentence shows, the intent is just to mention multiple facets of the audience’s worship of “that demigod”.

Answer 3

The appropriateness of the comma depends on how the grammar of the sentence is analyzed.

"The hundreds of eyes watching him" in Version 1 could be interpreted as a progressive participle phrase, with "the worship of so many people" as the subject, and "did not seem to make any difference to him" as the predicate.

In Version 2 (with the comma), we can view "The hundreds of eyes watching him" as the subject, "the worship of so many people" as an appositive phrase restating/renaming the subject, and "did not seem to make any difference to him" as (still) the predicate.

Unfortunately, Mr. Clemens (Twain) is no longer with us, so we cannot ask him about his sentence directly, but my impression of the sentence leads me to believe that "the worship of so many people" is an appositive phrase and the commas before and after it are necessary and correct.

You can learn about appositive phrases here.