Reading the Adventures of Tom Sawyer (The Engaged Reader)

Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Neil Heims

CHELSEA HOUSE PUBLISHERS

VP, NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT Sally Cheney DIRECTOR OF PRODUCTION Kim Shinners CREATIVE MANAGER Takeshi Takahashi MANUFACTURING MANAGER Diann Grasse Staff for READING THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER

EDITOR Matt Uhler PHOTO EDITOR Sarah Bloom PRODUCTION EDITOR Bonnie Cohen EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Sarah Sharpless SERIES DESIGNER Takeshi Takahashi COVER DESIGNER Takeshi Takahashi LAYOUT EJB Publishing Services ©2006 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of Haights Cross Communications. All rights reserved. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

www.chelseahouse.com First Printing 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Heims, Neil. Reading The adventures of Tom Sawyer / Neil Heims. p. cm. — (The engaged reader) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-7910-8828-6 1. Twain, Mark, 1835-1910. Adventures of Tom Sawyer—Juvenile literature. 2. Adventure stories, American—History and criticism—Juvenile literature. 3. Sawyer, Tom (Fictitious character)—Juvenile literature. 4. Boys in literature—Juvenile literature. I. Title. II. Series. PS1306.H45 2005 813’.4—dc22 2005009524

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Table of Contents

1

Context: Before You Read Tom Sawyer

2

Narrative Technique

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3

The Plot and Its Relation to the Story

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Characters and Characterization

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Setting: The World of Tom Sawyer

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6

Themes and Symbols

58

7

Afterword

66

Works by Mark Twain

71 73 75 76 78

Notes Bibliography Further Reading Index

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1 Context: Before You Read Tom Sawyer

THE BIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT MARK TWAIN WAS BORN Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi River in 1835, 14 years after statehood had been proclaimed. His father, John Marshall Clemens, was a lawyer and an unsuccessful businessman; he was a sad, introspective man who died when Twain was 12. Twain wrote in his autobiography that his father was: [s]ilent, austere, of perfect probity and high principle; ungentle of manner toward his children, but always a gentleman in his

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer phrasing—and never punished them—a look was enough, and more than enough.... When my father lay dying ... he put his arm around my sister’s neck and drew her down and kissed her, saying “Let me die.”1

In his work, Twain also showed concern for ideals and high principle. “I have always preached,” he once wrote. “If the humor came of its own accord and uninvited, I have allowed it a place in my sermon, but I was not writing the sermon for the sake of humor. I should have written the sermon just the same, whether any humor applied for admission or not.”2 But the humor always came, even when it was a bitter and corrosive humor, as it often was, whose function was to mock and puncture human vanity and the air of superiority. Twain’s humor very likely came from his mother. Jane Lampton Clemens was born in Kentucky into a wealthy family. Outgoing and full of life, she was Twain’s father’s opposite. As a girl she loved horses and riding. Of her, Twain wrote: [t]he greatest difference which I find between her and the rest of the people whom I have known, is this, and it is a remarkable one: those others felt a strong interest in a few things, whereas to the very day of her death she felt a strong interest in the whole world and everything and everybody in it.3

Laura Hawkins Frazer was Twain’s sweetheart when he was a boy in Hannibal, Missouri, and she became the model for Becky Thatcher, Tom’s sweetheart, in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In 1928, when she was 90, speaking of Twain’s mother, she told a New York Times reporter:

Context: Before You Read Tom Sawyer Mrs. Clemens was never fond of housekeeping. The monotony of it bored her. She often said she did not believe in doing anything that was disagreeable if you could help it. The things she liked to do she pursued with diligence, such as quiltmaking and embroidery. These domestic arts she practiced to almost the end of her days and she lived to be past 87. In all her likes and dislikes, Mrs. Clemens was quite decided. She cared for almost anything spectacular—parades, picnics, circuses, shows of all kinds. She found delight in going to market, enjoyed mingling with people and bringing them home with her. Her house was filled with guests oftener perhaps than she could afford. Mrs. Clemens, and in fact all the family, liked the colored [African American] people around Hannibal. The colored people liked her, and would do almost anything for her. They always called her Aunt Jane or Miss Jane. She was never a Puritan in any sense, but she tried to raise her children to be good and dutiful. In ’49, when the gold seekers on the way to California were streaming through our little town, many of the men and boys, including Sam [Mark Twain], got the gold fever. Mrs. Clemens excitedly watched the covered wagon processions go through. Sam, not content with mere watching, expended his energy with the gang playing at mining; they borrowed skiffs and went down the river three miles to the cave where they would stake their claims and pretend to dig gold.4

It is clear from this account that Mrs. Clemens and her son shared a sensibility for pageantry and adventure which is evident in much of his writing. Both Sam and his mother, also, Frazer recounted, enjoyed playing practical jokes on each other: Sam never got over liking to tease his mother. Once when he

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was away, he wrote her a letter marked “Personal.” She hurried off to read it in seclusion and found that it was written in Chinese. She had a habit of writing to him on scraps of paper and that irritated him. Once he got even with her by writing her a letter on small scraps of all kinds and colors of paper and without beginning or end—then jumbling them into an envelope.5

Indeed, episodes such as when Tom Sawyer and his companions let the townsfolk believe they have drowned and make their reappearance at their own funeral service, or when Tom gets other boys to do the unpleasant task of whitewashing his aunt’s fence for him, or when the boys lower a cat over the unsuspecting head of the befuddled schoolmaster and lift the wig from his gilded head are practical jokes that Twain expands and develops into complex, character-revealing narratives. It is also clear from Frazer’s account—the “borrowed” skiff and the cave she mentions appear in Tom Sawyer— and from Mark Twain’s own autobiographical book Life on the Mississippi that many of the childhood places, experiences, and adventures chronicled in Tom Sawyer were drawn from Twain’s own youth. When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman [boats driven by steam power were common on the Mississsippi River in the nineteenth century]. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient. When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show [a program of black American music and entertainment] that came to our section left us all

Context: Before You Read Tom Sawyer suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit as to be pirates. These ambitions faded out, each in its turn; but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained.6

After his father’s death, Twain had to leave school. He got a job as an apprentice typesetter for a newspaper in Hannibal, Missouri, and between 1847 and 1857, worked as a typesetter on several newspapers, some owned by his brother, Orion. During these years, Twain also traveled through the American Midwest, went east, and wrote short comic sketches and observations as “S.L.C.” for newspapers and magazines. In 1857, Twain fell under the spell of Horace Bixby, a Mississippi River steamboat captain, and realizing a childhood fantasy, became his apprentice. Together, they traveled up and down the river. In 1859, Twain obtained a riverboat pilot’s license. Many of his adventures formed the material for his book Life on the Mississippi. The advent of the Civil War made life on the Mississippi impossible. For a period of several weeks, Twain served in the Confederate Army, until he found war wasn’t for him and took himself

ON YOUR OWN ACTIVITY #1

In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain draws a picture of day-to-day life in a frontier town like the one in which he grew up, Hannibal, Missouri, in the days before the Civil War. After doing some research of your own, using sources other than Tom Sawyer, write a short essay about some aspect of daily life in such a town, focusing perhaps on schooling, religious activity, social organizations, jobs and work, or forms of play.

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer out. He also found that he did not agree with the southern cause, the cause of slavery. He joined his brother, a dedicated supporter of President Lincoln and the Union. He spent his time prospecting for gold and writing comic pieces for his brother’s newspaper about the prospectors he encountered. Challenged to a duel by another journalist who took offense at one of his pieces, Twain fled to San Francisco, where he continued to write humor for newspapers. In San Francisco, he managed to offend the police department and was sued for libel. He fled again, this time to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where he prospected for gold for a few months. Once he learned that the suit against him had been dropped, he returned to San Francisco. There he made the acquaintance of Artemus Ward. Artemus Ward, the pen name of Charles Farrar Browne, is not a familiar name today, but in the 1860s Ward was famous. He wrote humorous, satiric pieces, debunking arrogant moralists and pompous politicians, for newspapers and magazines, and he was a favorite of Abraham Lincoln. His prose was deliberately ungrammatical and full of puns. He also gave public lectures, what would now be called stand-up comedy or performance art, which he delivered in a deadpan style. Twain described, in a lecture of his own, Ward’s “way of pausing and hesitating, of gliding in a moment from seriousness to humor without appearing to be conscious of so doing.” It is a good description, too, according to reports, of Twain’s own delivery when he later appeared as a public speaker. There are no existing recordings of Twain’s performances, but there are recordings by the actor Hal Holbrook. Holbrook has appeared as Twain for nearly half a century since the 1950s in a program called Mark Twain Tonight. Holbrook’s rendition is generally

Context: Before You Read Tom Sawyer regarded by those who were old enough to have seen Twain himself as quite accurate.7 In 1865, Ward asked for a story from Twain for a collection of humorous writing. Twain finished the story too late for inclusion in the volume but it was printed in the November 18, 1865, edition of The New York Saturday Press under the title “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog.” It was reprinted in newspapers throughout America and was included in Twain’s first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches. Twain’s first commercial success came in the late 1860s with the publication of a series of letters, most of them printed in the Daily Alta California, a San Francisco newspaper that paid Twain to travel to Europe and Palestine aboard the ship Quaker City in 1867. The letters, satirical accounts of the wealthy shipboard passengers and the antics of the younger set on board, as well as observations of famous European and Middle-eastern cities, were published in book form as The Innocents Abroad in 1869. Twain characterized the book as “a record of a pleasure trip,” not “of a solemn scientific expedition.” It lacked, he wrote in the Preface, “that gravity, that profundity, and that impressive incomprehensibility which are so proper to works of that kind ... it is only a record of a picnic.” The book sold more than 70,000 copies during its first year in print. In 1869, too, Twain’s friend Charles Langdon invited Twain to stay with his family in Buffalo, New York, where Langdon’s father, Jervis Langdon, owned a newspaper. The next year, Twain married Charles’s sister, Olivia. Soon after their marriage, Jervis Langdon died. Twain and Olivia, who was now pregnant, moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where Twain finished writing Roughing It about his experiences

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer out west as a newspaperman and a gold prospector. Like The Innocents Abroad, it was a great success. Twain followed it with The Gilded Age, which was less successful commercially. During this period, Twain made several trips to England, where he gave public lectures. Upon his return to Hartford, Twain began The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which was published in 1876. The book was a terrific success and Twain immediately began a sequel, which became his masterwork, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1885. Twain was an immensely productive and prolific writer and made a great deal of money from his writing, but like his father, he also was an unwise businessman, frequently making disastrous investments, particularly in newfangled and too often half-baked printing machines. He faced bankruptcy several times and repeatedly rescued himself through arranging worldwide speaking tours. The blows of misfortune, like the death of his daughter from meningitis, the emotional breakdown of his wife, as well as his disgust with economic injustice, extreme nationalism, and militarism, turned his wit—always directed against human foibles—quite acerbic in tone. Although he was celebrated for his work, in his last years he became a bitter and indignant man. He died of a heart attack in 1910. THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, as much as it is the story of a boy, is very much also a picture of the United States in its youth. An informed reading of the novel benefits from a sense of the history of the region where it takes place. The United States acquired Missouri as part of Thomas Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France

Context: Before You Read Tom Sawyer in 1803. In the latter half of the seventeenth century, when the explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet had claimed the territory for the French king, it was home to the Missouri, Delaware, Kickapoo, Shawnee, Cherokee, and Osage nations. These Native American groups, and several tribes from outside the region—especially the Fox and the Sauk—often made incursions into the territory and frequently warred against each other. Around 1720, blacks from Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic) were brought into the Missouri territory as slaves by Philippe François Renault to work in the lead mines in what is now St. Louis and Jefferson counties in Missouri. EuropeanAmerican settlers from the east were slow to come to Missouri until after the War of 1812. Missouri settlement had been the result not only of lead mining and fur trading, but also of the establishment of plantations by Southern farmers leaving land in Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia after they had depleted the soil. The introduction of steamboats on the Mississippi River after 1812 was a timely benefit to settlement. Missouri was not, however, suited to the huge cotton plantations of the South, but rather to tobacco and hemp farming, and then only in the southern regions of the state. Unlike the Deep South, Missouri’s economy was a mix of agricultural, mining, industrial, and commercial—especially fur trading—enterprises. This sort of economic variety had cultural and political implications, for Missouri lacked the kind of single-minded acceptance of slavery that shaped the social institutions, the psychology, and the politics of the Deep South. Missouri’s admission to the Union was controversial because of the issue of slavery. Whether a new state would be a slave state or not was important to the young and

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer growing United States. Both sides in the debate over slavery saw the nature of the United States and the degree of their own power defined by whether or not the nation would allow slavery to continue. Finally, under a tortuous agreement called the Missouri Compromise, Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state, although legislation did not allow slavery in land north of latitude 36°30’. Only the boot heel of Missouri lies south of that latitude. In reality, therefore, Missouri was both a slave and free state. Slavery in Missouri, though reprehensible and oppressive, was somewhat milder than in the Deep South. Because of the absence of the plantation system, in general, no one family owned large numbers of slaves. Consequently, whites and blacks often worked together in something more like an enforced partnership characterized by inequality and brutality towards blacks than plantation organization typically allowed. While it was illegal for blacks to be taught to read and write, they often served as laborers, mechanics, riverboat crews, and craftsmen as well as field laborers and house servants. As in the Deep South, however, the culture of the enslaved population—beliefs, stories, superstitions—influenced the culture of their owners. Repeatedly in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain shows that many of the boys’ rituals, beliefs, and

ON YOUR OWN ACTIVITY #2

European settlers in North America displaced native people and imported black people as slaves. Compare and contrast the way Native Americans and black slaves were treated in states in the Deep South and in states like Mark Twain’s Missouri.

Context: Before You Read Tom Sawyer superstitions reflect those of the slaves who lived among them. The Native Americans in Missouri were systematically deprived of their lands through forced treaties signed with the United States government, and they were confined to reservations the government created for their use. Their culture was destroyed by such limitations, and “Indians,” as is the case in the depiction of Injun Joe in Tom Sawyer, were viewed, even by Twain, as murderous, untrustworthy, thieving, treacherous, and wily.8 THE CULTURAL CONTEXT Twain published Tom Sawyer in 1876, during an era called “the Gilded Age,” after the title of one of his own books describing the corruption and decadence of the late 1860s and the 1870s. He was living in Connecticut when he wrote Tom Sawyer, and was an internationally famous writer who had been to Europe. His neighbors at home included Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the historically significant abolitionist novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer takes place some 30 or 40 years earlier, before the Civil War, in a small western town with a frontier culture modeled after his own Hannibal, Missouri. The world that Twain depicts in Tom Sawyer, although far from ideal, nevertheless reflects a longing for a less sophisticated time, not of innocence but of simplicity. Boys go without shoes, play in the river without clothes, crawl out of their windows at midnight, and swear oaths in blood. It is a world where the boundaries between imagination and reality, between desire and opportunity, are blurred.

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2 Narrative Technique

THE VISIBLE NARRATOR THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER is framed by an introduction and a conclusion in which the strong and controlling presence of an omniscient narrator (a narrator possessing complete knowledge) is established. He presides as a commentator throughout the novel. Not only is the author-narrator all knowing, but he sets the tone of his narrative in the introduction. Before the curtain rises, Twain steps out in front of it in order to prepare readers, to put us in a right and receptive frame of mind. He forges an alliance with us, shares with us information about

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Narrative Technique his story and how he created it. This way of showing us his hand predisposes us to trust him to carry us through the book. It is a technique that recurs, as for example at the end of Chapter 16, when he intrudes upon the scene of Tom, Huck, and Joe on Jackson’s Island saying, “We will leave them to smoke and chatter and brag, since we have no further use for them at present.” The presence of the author-narrator suggests that although Tom Sawyer may be a trickster, his chronicler is not. If we think the characters are contrived or the incidents in the story far-fetched, Twain is here to assure us we are not being duped: he can guarantee their authenticity. To the degree that the author is a trickster, his tricks are performances put on for the reader’s enjoyment and appreciation. They are tricks of the writing art rather than tricks of deception, the kind that we can appreciate when he juggles the interconnected climactic episodes of the novel. The first thing Twain does in the Preface is reassure readers of the truthfulness of the story: “Most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred; one or two were experiences of my own, the rest those of boys who were schoolmates of mine.” He is not making things up. He is composing and reconfiguring things which really occurred. We are not wasting our time with make-believe, but we are being shown how people really lived and behaved, how they thought and felt. Of course, it is difficult to be sure that such authorial confidences are not tricks and artistic deceptions themselves, but a look at the nonfiction chronicle of his youth, Life on the Mississippi, is reassuring about Twain’s truthfulness. If we have any reservations about the value of fiction, we can be easy, the author-narrator seems to assure us, because in reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer we are as much in the realm of history as of fiction.

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Perhaps we can even learn some universal truths about ourselves as the author intervenes repeatedly with observations about his characters that can apply to the human character in general. Joe Harper, for example, in Chapter 16 is made to realize, “Swimming’s no good ... when there ain’t anybody to say I shan’t go in.” Tom Sawyer learns in Chapter 22, when he joins a temperance society, “that to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body go and do that very thing.” Thus, the author establishes his trustworthiness for us as an observer by taking us into his confidence regarding his method of craftsmanship and by showing his capacity to draw wisdom from the common responses of his characters. In an act of authorial familiarity, Mark Twain tells us how he works: “Huck Finn is drawn from life; Tom Sawyer also, but not from an individual—he is a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom I knew, and therefore belongs to the composite order of architecture.” Thus, Tom can be seen as a typical boy as well as a particular fictional character. After asserting the authenticity of his characters, Twain proceeds to verify another aspect of the story, “[t]he

ON YOUR OWN ACTIVITY #3

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is narrated by a third person narrator who is aware of everything that is happening and that will happen. Not only does he tell the story but he continually interposes his own point of view and attitude in his narration. Choose one of the episodes from the book and re-write it, telling it from the point of view of one of the characters and conveying that character’s attitude about the action and the other characters.

Narrative Technique odd superstitions touched upon” in the novel. They were, he explains, “all prevalent among children and slaves in the West at the period of this story.” Without having to say it outright, the author is suggesting that The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a useful historical document presenting cultural facts and artifacts. The way children made sense of the world is shown as is the fact that their understanding was influenced by the slave population. By recording the influence that the enslaved black population had on the thought and beliefs of the whites, Twain undercuts the social barrier of slavery and its defining myth of racial difference. By incorporating some of those beliefs and superstitions into his story, the author-narrator is, therefore, a folklorist as well as a novelist. To the degree that his readers may be distressed that such superstition is passed on, he is suggesting that the effect of keeping one segment of the population uneducated is not without consequences to the privileged group, too. Twain then sets the story written during the 1870s, in its historical period, “that is to say, thirty or forty years ago.” The novel is a reminder of a simpler time. Following the gruesome, devastating, traumatic Civil War, the 1870s was an era of social and economic change, of corruption, and of confusion. Emerging social and economic realities caused by the end of slavery and the plantation system in the South and by the rise of Northern industrial power and political domination redefined America. It was no longer a young, innocent nation. “Although my book,” Twain wrote in the Preface, “is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account, for part of my plan has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer enterprises they sometimes engaged in.” It is also a reminder of how life itself was lived in a time of national as well as individual youth. THE NARRATOR IN CONTROL The nostalgia that The Adventures of Tom Sawyer suggests is checked by the droll cynicism and common sense of the author-narrator’s observations throughout the telling of the tale. There is another reason that the author-narrator must be a strong presence. It is obvious at the very outset of the story. Tom Sawyer begins with Aunt Polly searching for Tom: “TOM!” No answer. “TOM!” No answer. “What’s gone with that boy, I wonder? You TOM!” No answer.

When she does find him, the reader finds him, too, in a typical and defining situation: There was a slight noise behind her and she turned just in time to seize a small boy by the slack of his roundabout and arrest his flight. “There! I might ‘a’ thought of that closet. What you been doing in there?” “Nothing.” “Nothing! Look at your hands. And look at your mouth. What is that truck?” “I don’t know, aunt.” “Well, I know. It’s jam—that’s what it is. Forty times I’ve said if you didn’t let that jam alone I’d skin you. Hand me that

Narrative Technique switch.” The switch hovered in the air—the peril was desperate— “My! Look behind you, aunt!” The old lady whirled round, and snatched her skirts out of danger. The lad fled on the instant, scrambled up the high board-fence, and disappeared over it.

Tom Sawyer makes his first appearance as a “mischeevous” (as his aunt will later characterize him) trickster. No matter how he riles up his aunt, he always is shapeshifter enough to evade her momentary wrath and to get out of whatever jam he gets himself into. And her wrath is always momentary: His aunt Polly stood surprised a moment, and then broke into a gentle laugh. “Hang the boy, can’t I never learn anything? Ain’t he played me tricks enough like that for me to be looking out for him by this time? But old fools is the biggest fools there is. Can’t learn an old dog new tricks, as the saying is. But my goodness, he never plays them alike, two days, and how is a body to know what’s coming? He ’pears to know just how long he can torment me before I get my dander up, and he knows if he can make out to put me off for a minute or make me laugh, it’s all down again and I can’t hit him a lick.”9

Aunt Polly’s response is the model for what the reader’s response ought to be, momentary consternation lightened by an affectionate appreciation for Tom’s lively shrewdness. She is always bested by him, too. But, for the authornarrator, such a relation to his character would spell disaster—the character must not be able to evade his author—for then Twain would lose the narrative authority

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer essential for telling the story and illuminating human character and experience. The result would be chaos. It is not possible to write about something you don’t have command of or at least understand, unless you are writing a novel whose theme is the tragic inadequacy of humankind. Twain, in Tom Sawyer, however, is writing about the comic foibles, vanity, and even sometimes the heroism of the species. If the author-narrator were not in control, more far-seeing than Aunt Polly, and more clever than Tom, the reader would be bested by the character too, a sign of narrative failure. In a novel, it is all right for readers to be in the dark for a while and glued to a book by suspense, but the reader must know that the author is not similarly at a loss, but controlling the flow of information for maximum effect. The reader of a “pleasant” story, as Tom Sawyer is meant to be, must not be at the mercy of the characters. The reader must be able to see into them, appreciate and enjoy them, but not be perplexed or outfoxed by them. The counterpoint to Tom’s hijinks and tricky mischief is the narrator’s wry wisdom, deeper insight, and firm grip. Twain is able to show how his characters fit into the order of the world, even as they sometimes seem to defy it. After Tom evades, only temporarily, his aunt’s wrath, for example, Twain writes:

ON YOUR OWN ACTIVITY #4

Write a short essay exploring the effect that the strong presence of the author-narrator in Tom Sawyer has on the reader’s experience of the novel.

Narrative Technique Within two minutes, or even less, he had forgotten all his troubles. Not because his troubles were one whit less heavy and bitter to him than a man’s are to a man, but because a new and powerful interest bore them down and drove them out of his mind for the time—just as men’s misfortunes are forgotten in the excitement of new enterprises.10

Tom Sawyer is true to the laws of human behavior, and the author is wise in the ways of that behavior. Tom Sawyer’s exuberance is all the more brightly presented to the reader because of the author-narrator’s continuous understatement. The more out-of-the-ordinary Tom’s actions, the more matter-of-fact Twain is as he describes them. He celebrates Tom Sawyer by seeming not to, so that he may comment, with a certain puckish air, upon the odd foolishness of human behavior. In Chapter 35, for example, after Tom’s climactic adventures in the cave and after he and Huck retrieve buried treasure: The boys were not able to remember that their remarks had possessed weight before; but now their sayings were treasured and repeated; everything they did seemed somehow to be regarded as remarkable; they had evidently lost the power of doing and saying commonplace things; moreover, their past history was raked up and discovered to bear marks of conspicuous originality.

AN OBJECTIVE VIEW OF THE WORLD The omniscient narrator also provides an objective description of the world in which the story of the novel unfolds. He is like the camera in a movie panning over the surface of the landscape where the action takes place, recording the scene. As such, he is not neutral—neutrality is impossible

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as even a picture is shot from a particular angle. Nevertheless, he offers something like an objective setting. It conforms to the world he is creating rather than reflecting the psychology of the character, which would be the narrative result in a story with the character, rather than the author, as narrator. Look, for instance, at Twain’s description, at the beginning of Chapter II, of the day when Tom is condemned to whitewash his aunt’s fence as a punishment: Saturday morning was come, and all the summer world was bright and fresh, and brimming with life. There was a song in every heart; and if the heart was young the music issued at the lips. There was cheer in every face and a spring in every step. The locust trees were in bloom and the fragrance of the blossoms filled the air. Cardiff Hill, beyond the village and above it, was green with vegetation and it lay just far enough away to seem a Delectable Land, dreamy, reposeful and inviting.

This description reflects the world, but not Tom’s vision of the world. Tom steps onto this stage as he is seen and presented in his unhappy condition by the narrator. The reader is distanced from the character and is ready to see and enjoy his wily strategy. Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence, nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden. Sighing, he dipped his brush and passed it along the topmost plank; repeated the operation; did it again; compared the insignificant whitewashed streak with the far-reaching continent of unwhitewashed fence, and sat down on a treebox discouraged.

Narrative Technique From a description of Tom’s outward action, Twain has proceeded to a depiction of his inner state. Then he sets in motion the drama of how Tom gets other boys to whitewash the fence for him; and the author-narrator steps back and in his own voice comments on the scene. First, he describes its effect on his protagonist: Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

Then the author-narrator makes his own observation, mocking himself, but commenting nevertheless and, in fact, enhancing the appearance of being wise by his selfdeprecation: If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a treadmill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passengercoaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.

Having a strong narrator who is outside the story relating the events of the story allows readers to surrender to the excitement and cleverness of the plot. We can enjoy seeing other people duped as long as we are not also being duped.

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer We are safe in capable and trustworthy hands. The tension created, for example, by the murder-in-the-graveyard or the lost-in-the-cave scenes is prevented from being overwhelming because the reader can sense the author-narrator’s control. Moreover, the reader’s concern is not only with what is going to happen but with how the author-narrator is going to make it happen. The fun of seeing the teacher’s toupee lifted is in the cleverness of the trick of lowering the cat. The author-narrator’s control allows the reader to appreciate his virtuoso performance as a storyteller as well as the quality of the story he is telling. In the case of Twain particularly, it helps establish the narrator as a definable and even marketable personality—what at present is called a brand name—independent of his narrative, as a performer and a celebrity in his own right, whose books people will pay to read and whose lectures people will pay to attend. THE NARRATOR ABOVE THE ACTION Throughout Tom Sawyer, in fact, the author-narrator himself is visible as a kind of character, not a character who participates in the action, but one who directs it, comments on it, and is, in his capacity above it, a puppeteer without qualms at showing himself pulling the strings and talking about his dolls. Besides the entertainment his opinions and his wit provide, they also reinforce the reader’s sense of his overall control, even if Tom Sawyer is so strong a character that he continually threatens to escape the grasp of anyone who would try to tell his story. There is a pointed example of Tom’s power early in the novel, toward the end of Chapter 5, when Tom disrupts a church service:

Narrative Technique [T]he dry argument was resumed. Presently [Tom] bethought him of a treasure he had and got it out. It was a large black beetle with formidable jaws—a “pinchbug,” he called it. It was in a percussion-cap box. The first thing the beetle did was to take him by the finger. A natural fillip followed, the beetle went floundering into the aisle and lit on its back.... The beetle lay there working its helpless legs, unable to turn over. Tom eyed it, and longed for it.... Other people uninterested in the sermon, found relief in the beetle, and they eyed it too. Presently a vagrant poodle dog came idling along, sad at heart, lazy with the summer softness and the quiet, weary of captivity, sighing for change. He spied the beetle; the drooping tail lifted and wagged. He surveyed the prize; walked around it; smelt at it from a safe distance; walked around it again; grew bolder, and took a closer smell; then lifted his lip and made a gingerly snatch at it, just missing it; made another, and another; began to enjoy the diversion; subsided to his stomach with the beetle between his paws, and continued his experiments; grew weary at last, and then indifferent and absent-minded. His head nodded, and little by little his chin descended and touched the enemy, who seized it. There was a sharp yelp, a flirt of the poodle’s head, and the beetle fell a couple of yards away, and lit on its back once more. The neighboring spectators shook with a gentle inward joy, several faces went behind fans and handkerchiefs, and Tom was entirely happy. The dog looked foolish, and probably felt so; but there was resentment in his heart, too, and a craving for revenge. So he went to the beetle and began a wary attack on it again; jumping at it from every point of a circle, lighting with his fore-paws within an inch of the creature, making even closer snatches at it with his teeth, and jerking his head till his ears flapped again. But he grew tired once more, after a while ... yawned, sighed, forgot the beetle entirely, and sat

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer down on it! Then there was a wild yelp of agony and the poodle went sailing up the aisle; the yelps continued, and so did the dog; he crossed the house in front of the altar; he flew down the other aisle; he crossed before the doors; he clamored up the home-stretch; his anguish grew with his progress, till presently he was but a woolly comet moving in its orbit with the gleam and the speed of light. At last the frantic sufferer sheered from its course, and sprang into its master’s lap; he flung it out of the window, and the voice of distress quickly thinned away and died in the distance. By this time the whole church was red-faced and suffocating with suppressed laughter, and the sermon had come to a dead standstill....

Tom’s ability to undermine authority is formidable. It is significant that the section which is concluded by this madcap event begins with Twain’s irreverent description first of the Sunday-school Superintendent and then of the minister, who “gave out his text and droned along monotonously through an argument that was so prosy that many a head by and by began to nod.”11 In each case, the narrator is far more entertaining than the minister, and in each case the narrator’s heart is with the boy and not with the bore, so it follows that when Tom unleashes his disruption, his offense is not against the narrator. Indeed, he is the narrator’s agent. The reader should also notice with what precision and enthusiasm the narrator invests this rather long passage where actually very little is happening—a dog is playing with a bug in the center aisle of the church during the minister’s sermon. Besides being his agents, characters can also serve as examples for lessons the author-narrator wishes to convey or points he wishes to make. The seamless connection

Narrative Technique between the narrative and the commentary testifies to the author-narrator’s skill. Notice the transition in the following bit of narrative, in Chapter 31, from storytelling to commentary. Tom and Becky are lost in the cave: So they moved on again—aimlessly—simply at random—all they could do was to move, keep moving. For a little while, hope made a show of reviving—not with any reason to back it, but only because it is its nature to revive when the spring has not been taken out of it by age and familiarity with failure.

The observation in the last sentence reminds us that although the children are lost, the narrator has not lost them, and more than that, he knows something of experience that they do not. This narrative voice shows up repeatedly throughout Tom Sawyer at odd moments, adds color by its wit, and expands on the story in ways it would otherwise be without, not just by what the author says but by the way he says it. In Chapter XVII, for example, when Tom, Huck, and Joe are believed to be dead: there was a dispute about who saw the dead boys last in life, and many claimed that dismal distinction, and offered evidences, more or less tampered with by the witness; and when it was ultimately decided who did see the departed last, and exchanged the last words with them, the lucky parties took upon themselves a sort of sacred importance, and were gaped at and envied by all the rest.

The wry introduction of the legal language “more or less tampered with by the witness,” suggested by the previous phrase “offered evidences,” highlights the narrator’s cynicism regarding human conduct. It also anticipates, ever so

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer quietly, the important trial testimony Tom later will give regarding the murder of Dr. Robinson. Similarly, Twain intervenes in Chapter 21 when he is giving a sample of dreadful exercises in prose composition: A prevalent feature in these compositions was a nursed and petted melancholy; another was a wasteful and opulent gush of “fine language”; another was a tendency to lug in by the ears particularly prized words and phrases until they were worn entirely out; and a peculiarity that conspicuously marked and marred them was the inveterate and intolerable sermon that wagged its crippled tail at the end of each and every one of them.

Accurate as his criticism may be, his expressive phrases “lug in by the ears” and “wagged its crippled tail” make the infelicities of the essays seem like abused dogs, and assure the reader that Twain has the authority to offer it. A phrase like “a laced and ruffled Niagara in gleaming and imperishable stone,” used to describe a cave formation, is what helps to make The Adventures of Tom Sawyer long-lasting literature rather than a forgotten novel.

3 The Plot and Its Relation to the Story

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A STORY AND A PLOT IN ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL, author and literary critic E.M. Forster differentiates between the story of a novel and the plot. A story is bound to time, propelled by a sense of “and then ... and then ... and then.” A plot, however, does not rely on time but on something being caused by something else. In Forster’s words, “a story [is] a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence. A plot is a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality.” He illustrates the difference this way: “‘The king died. And then the queen died’ is a story. The king died and then

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer the queen died of grief’ is a plot.”12 Plot is a strategy for arrangement, for putting a story together and showing how the parts relate and contribute to each other, not in terms of time but in terms of cause and effect—how one thing leads to another, how problems develop and are solved, or remain unsolved. Story satisfies our curiosity; plot exercises our ability to detect patterns and rewards our intelligence. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is the story of a boy and of his adventures. His adventures are what make him interesting because they are interesting. Two things are necessary to make those adventures interesting. The first is the quality of the incidents or situations which constitute the adventures. They must be interesting in themselves: witnessing a murder in a graveyard at midnight; taking upon oneself the punishment intended for a beloved; watching, from a secret hiding place, while thieves hide their gold and then almost getting caught; being trapped in a cave and nearly perishing. The second thing that makes the adventures interesting is the way the incidents are connected, the patterns they form, the problems and conflicts they generate, and the solutions that are devised. Events or situations must be put together in a meaningful way so that they comment upon, amplify, and complicate one another and thereby involve the reader, otherwise they tend to get boring. “So what!” a reader may begin to feel as events pile up. A story composed of such adventures is called episodic. It does not make a demand on the reader’s intelligence to see how things relate and connect to each other (Forster’s definition of plot), nor does it satisfy the fundamental reader’s desire to find patterns. When Tom takes Becky’s punishment in school, for example, the episode is enriched by the counter situation:

The Plot and Its Relation to the Story Becky knows that Tom will be beaten for something he did not do (spill ink on his spelling book). She saw another boy, Alfred Temple, do it out of jealous spite. But she decides not to prevent the beating by telling the teacher what she knows because she is miffed with Tom. Not only does the reader see Tom’s and Becky’s acts in relation to each other, but so does Becky. That kind of plotting adds depth to her as a character. The plot of Tom Sawyer is, of course, built upon a story. It is a complex story with many twists. Tom’s response to the story, the way he reacts to and deals with events, creates the plot and, at the same time, defines his character. His character is the motor of the plot: Tom makes the plot move, for his character brings the events of the story into a relationship to each other that is more than episodic. Remember the queen, in Forster’s example, died of grief— that indicates something about her character and provides the next event of the story. Tom’s existence as a character, which means how the events of the story affect him and what he does about them, makes the episodes in his story meaningful and of concern to us as readers. How Tom’s character propels the story can be seen clearly in both the fence whitewashing scene and the scene in school when he sits next to Becky. Tom’s most significant

ON YOUR OWN ACTIVITY #5

Upon examination, it is evident that the plot of Tom Sawyer is made up of many strands, that it is quite intricate. Make a flowchart of the plot of Tom Sawyer identifying and delineating the several separate plot strands and showing where and how they join.

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer characteristics are his willfulness and ingenuity, not his defiance of authority or his laziness. Two examples are Aunt Polly’s reaction upon seeing the white-washed fence, and the earlier episode of the whitewashing itself. While it is true that Tom does not want to spend a Saturday laboring at the fence and he gets other boys to do his chore, what makes the episode interesting is “how to avoid the work” becomes an engaging problem for Tom, which he sets about to solve. In addition, when he finds a way out, he is playing a role that perfectly expresses his character. The story of the fence painting could not exist, in other words, without Tom being the way he is. Similarly, that he does not want to go to school is not what makes him interesting or does not advance the plot of the story. It is simply a boy’s common response to school. What he does in school when he is compelled to be there—how he comes to sit next to Becky, for example, or how he and Joe Harper play with a tick on their slate with such absorption that they are not aware of the teacher behind them until they both feel his blow to their heads— is what makes Tom interesting and what moves the story forward. CONSTRUCTING PLOT: MOTIVATION For a story to become a plot, it is necessary for events to be connected. One event must be the consequence of a preceding event, rather than one event merely following another in time. When Tom is made to sit among the girls in Chapter VI, he is being punished not because he is late to school but because of the reason he gives for being late, as he confesses, “I STOPPED TO TALK WITH HUCKLEBERRY FINN!” the “juvenile pariah of the village.” This confession is not only an accidental incident in a

The Plot and Its Relation to the Story sequence of events but, because Tom planned it, it causes the story to move forward: Tom gets to sit next to Becky. The encounter between Tom and Huck has additional repercussions. It introduces one of the principle plot strands of the novel. When Tom meets Huck—outcast that he is, Huck does not go to school—Huck is carrying a dead cat. “Say—what is dead cats good for, Huck?” Tom asks. “Good for? Cure warts with,” Huck answers. The conversation continues for awhile as the boys swap remedies for warts until they return to the usefulness of dead cats. “But say,” Tom asks Huck, “how do you cure ‘em [warts] with dead cats?” Why, you take your cat and go and get in the graveyard ’long about midnight when somebody that was wicked has been buried; and when it’s midnight a devil will come, or maybe two or three, but you can’t see ’em, you can only hear something like the wind, or maybe hear ’em talk; and when they’re taking that feller away, you heave your cat after ’em and say, “Devil follow corpse, cat follow devil, warts follow cat, I’m done with ye!” That’ll fetch any wart.13

It “sounds right” to Tom, so he and Huck decide to go to the graveyard at midnight. Old Hoss Williams was buried Saturday and the boys expect the devil will come for him, giving them the opportunity to try their cat magic. Hidden behind shrubs in the graveyard, they see Injun Joe, Doctor Robinson, and Muff Potter come to dig up Hoss William’s body for the doctor. They witness Joe murder Robinson. Frightening though the murder is, its significance for the plot of the novel is compounded by the fact that Joe has no trouble making the drunk Muff Potter believe, although he cannot remember it, that he (Muff Potter, not Injun Joe) killed Robinson. Joe flees

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer from the graveyard, but the drunk Potter falls asleep not far from the scene of the murder and the bloody knife, which Joe had put in his hand. In the morning, the murder is discovered and the apparent murderer, too. Tom and Huck, the only ones who know the truth, have vowed in writing, and sealed it with their blood, to remain silent because they are afraid that Injun Joe, invested in their minds with the power of the devil, will take revenge upon them. Following E.M. Forster’s formula, “Injun Joe kills Doctor Robinson and Tom and Huck remain silent” is a story. “Injun Joe kills Doctor Robinson and Tom and Huck remain silent out of fear” is a plot. Similarly, after Muff Potter is jailed, Tom and Huck bring him food and tobacco, which continues the story. That they do this out of a sense of guilt—because they know that he is not the murderer but are afraid to tell—is part of the plot. Motivation is an important element in the construction and development of plot, as another set of episodes in Chapter III of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer demonstrates. After Tom has whitewashed the fence, his aunt allows him to go play. As he is returning home to supper after the day’s activities, he sees Becky Thatcher for the first time, standing in her garden behind a fence. To impress her, Tom shows off a bit, and she, proud and flirtatious, tosses a flower at him (rather than to him), which lands a little distance away from him. She disappears into the house and he picks up the flower and keeps it. During supper that night, Tom’s half-brother, Sid, breaks the sugar bowl and Aunt Polly, believing Tom to be the culprit, lands him a blow. Tom protests his innocence. Aunt Polly is “perplexed” but only says, “Well, you didn’t get a lick amiss, I reckon. You been into some other audacious mischief when I wasn’t around, like enough.”

The Plot and Its Relation to the Story The episode is brief, and it could serve as another colorful instance of the unfairness a boy has to endure from grown-ups. But Mark Twain uses it to advance the plot, that is, to give meaning to the story. The episode shows the underlying motives for a future action of Tom’s, which this episode, in large part, also generates. It gives psychological depth and cause to that later action. Rather than being the arbitrary invention of a storyteller wishing to keep his story going, the action becomes necessary to the plot. The course the plot takes is a consequence of Tom’s ongoing situation: it arises from his response to his aunt’s treatment as well as his gloom at being spurned by Becky. Here is the sequence: Despite Aunt Polly’s bluff dismissal of the injustice of slapping Tom for the sugar bowl, afterwards: [h]er conscience reproached her, and she yearned to say something kind and loving; but she judged that this would be construed into a confession that she had been in the wrong, and discipline forbade that. So she kept silence, and went about her affairs with a troubled heart.

Tom, for his part: sulked in a corner and exalted his woes. He knew that in her heart his aunt was on her knees to him, and he was morosely gratified by the consciousness of it.... He pictured himself lying sick unto death and his aunt bending over him beseeching one little forgiving word, but he would turn his face to the wall, and die with that word unsaid.... he pictured himself brought home from the river, dead.

Tom is feeling sorry for himself. He has been unjustly punished, his aunt has not acknowledged the injustice, and this deflation follows a time when his young heart is filled with a new love for a girl who has been coy in her response

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer to his attention. Tom seeks out a “desolate place,” sits on a log by the water, thinks of Becky, luxuriates in “an agony of pleasurable suffering.” Then, on his way home, he stops by her house, climbs over the fence, lies down in the garden under her window, and is doused with a bucketful of cold water tossed by a maid from an upstairs window. He goes home and goes to bed without saying his prayers. So ends the episode and the chapter, and in the next chapter, he is up to his tricks again. But the preceding episode reverberates in a later episode of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Although the narrator does not announce the connection, an alert reader will see it and consequently give the later episode the depth and resonance it would otherwise lack. A reader who recalls Tom’s luxurious despondency and his fantasy of being dead when reading the later episode will see that the narrative progression is one of plot rather than just story. In Chapter XIII, Tom, Joe Harper, and Huck run away to become pirates. They meet at midnight, loaded with provisions they have managed to swipe from their family larders, and take a skiff out to the deserted Jackson’s Island, located in the middle of the Mississippi River three miles below St. Petersburg. They build a fire, talk like pirates, swim, fish, and frolic. The next day, they begin to be homesick, but Tom opposes going home. As they are sitting around, “a deep, sullen boom came floating down out of the distance.” Curious, “[t]hey sprang to their feet and hurried to the shore toward the town. They parted the bushes on the bank and peered out over the water.” They saw a little steam ferry boat ... about a mile below the village, drifting with the current. Her broad deck seemed crowded with people. There were a great many skiffs rowing about or

The Plot and Its Relation to the Story floating with the stream in the neighborhood of the ferry boat, but the boys could not determine what the men in them were doing. Presently a great jet of white smoke burst from the ferry-boat’s side, and as it expanded and rose in a lazy cloud, that same dull throb of sound was borne to the listeners again.14

Then Tom exclaims, “I know now! [S]omebody’s drownded!” and after some more consideration, he realizes, “it’s us!” The boys are elated: They felt like heroes in an instant. Here was a gorgeous triumph; they were missed; they were mourned; hearts were breaking on their account; tears were being shed; accusing memories of unkindness to these poor lost lads were rising up, and unavailing regrets and remorse were being indulged; and best of all, the departed were the talk of the whole town, and the envy of all the boys, as far as this dazzling notoriety was concerned. This was fine. It was worth while to be a pirate, after all.

Nevertheless, they still want to end the adventure and go home: [W]hen the shadows of night closed them in, they gradually ceased to talk, and sat gazing into the fire, with their minds evidently wandering elsewhere. The excitement was gone, now, and Tom and Joe could not keep back thoughts of certain persons at home who were not enjoying this fine frolic as much as they were. Misgivings came; they grew troubled and unhappy; a sigh or two escaped, unawares. By and by Joe timidly ventured upon a roundabout “feeler” as to how the others might look upon a return to civilization—not right now, but ...

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Despite his own homesickness, which is similar to Joe’s, when Joe hints at wanting to go home “Tom withered him with derision! ... and the waverer quickly ‘explained,’ and was glad to get out of the scrape with as little taint of chicken-hearted home-sickness clinging to his garments as he could.” But when Joe and Huck are asleep, Tom steals off Jackson’s Island, sneaks home, and, in Chapter 15, secretly listens to a conversation between his Aunt Polly and Mrs. Harper, Joe’s mother. Thinking the boys are dead, the women talk of them with love and with remorse for any acts of their own harshness against them. Aunt Polly says of Tom, “[H]e warn’t bad, so to say—only mischeevous. Only just giddy, and harum-scarum, you know. He warn’t any more responsible than a colt. He never meant any harm, and he was the best-hearted boy that ever was”—and she began to cry.

After Mrs. Harper leaves and Aunt Polly goes to bed, Tom stands over her and gives her a kiss in her sleep. He almost leaves a piece of tree bark with a written message that they are alive and not to fret at her bedside, but then decides not to and returns to Huck and Joe on Jackson’s Island. The boys continue their adventure. Huck teaches them to smoke tobacco, and they play at Indian wars, but once again Joe gets homesick. So does Huck, but Tom prevents their departure by telling them something that Twain withholds from readers until after Tom’s scheme is accoplished. Then, afterwards, in Chapter 18, the author-narrator says, with something of Tom’s own delight in self-dramatization: “THAT was Tom’s great secret—the scheme to return home with his brother pirates and attend their own funerals.” For that was Tom’s secret plan, which Twain recounts

The Plot and Its Relation to the Story as it unfolds. Twain takes the reader through Sunday morning before church service as the children of the town remember Tom. He rehearses the church service and arrives at the point when The congregation became more and more moved, as the pathetic tale went on, till at last the whole company broke down and joined the weeping mourners in a chorus of anguished sobs, the preacher himself giving way to his feelings, and crying in the pulpit.

At that point, There was a rustle in the gallery, which nobody noticed; a moment later the church door creaked; the minister raised his streaming eyes above his handkerchief, and stood transfixed! First one and then another pair of eyes followed the minister’s, and then almost with one impulse the congregation rose and stared while the three dead boys came marching up the aisle.15

The climactic return of the three boys indicates a resolution in the plot as well as a continuation of the story. We as readers are not, however, surprised as the townsfolk in the church are that the boys are alive, nor are we surprised by the relief and joy Aunt Polly and Mrs. Harper feel, nor at their expressing it with a combination of “cuffs and kisses.” We can delight in the way the boys make their return, even if we suspected Tom’s scheme, for one of the delights of plot, besides frustrating our expectations, is finally fulfilling them. The primary reward this climax provides, however, is the gratification of an insight: we understand Tom’s sense of achievement. Because we remember the earlier episode with Becky, we know that Tom has realized the fantasy of experiencing his own death.

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer But the plot of the novel, as it unfolds, will do him one better for its climax. Tom with Becky, trapped deep in a cave, will face the probability of real death. Exciting as that adventure in the cave is, it is the way the narrator constructs the plot and weaves the strands together that makes the climax of the novel memorable and worthy of repeated readings. MAPPING THE PLOT OF TOM SAWYER Tom Sawyer is the story of a boy’s life in a frontier town. Tom’s initial appeal is that he is a representative boy. In his view, the world revolves around him. He has an active imagination and a lot of bravado. He is always on the lookout for the opportunity to play out his fantasy adventures. In the early chapters of the book, Tom, Huck Finn, and Joe Harper pretend to be Robin Hood or pirates or Indians. In church or in school, Tom manages to be disruptive through innocent-enough mischief making, generally brought about because the constraints and demands put upon youth— chores, church, and school—are boring and confining. But in Chapter 9, the worlds of pretending and reality start to merge, and the central plot of the novel begins to emerge when Tom and Huck, going on one of their playful adventures into the graveyard at midnight, stumble upon a real

ON YOUR OWN ACTIVITY #6

As well as being a character in the story, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tom Sawyer himself makes up stories. Briefly describe some of the stories he tells or enacts and discuss what effect they have on the story Mark Twain is telling.

The Plot and Its Relation to the Story adventure, get deeply involved in real danger, and are confronted with serious responsibilities. In the graveyard at midnight, they witness Injun Joe murder Doctor Robinson. Chapters 9 through 22 show a gradual change in the story. Tom, Huck, and Joe Harper run away to Jackson’s Island to play at being pirates and Indians and smoke tobacco. But an edge of reality sideswipes their pretending, for the townsfolk think they have drowned. The episode ends grandly, however, when Tom stages the boys’ triumphant return to life in the middle of their own funeral. Tom also experiences the tribulations and triumphs of love with Becky Thatcher. There is also a more disturbing theme running through these chapters that is not confined to the imaginative world of childhood: Muff Potter is in jail awaiting trial and execution, Injun Joe is free and not suspected of his crime, and Tom and Huck are the only ones who know the truth. The boys are afraid to reveal it and must grapple with their sense of obligation to do the right thing. The final section of Tom Sawyer begins with Chapter 23 when Tom testifies in court that he witnessed Injun Joe kill Doctor Robinson and Injun Joe bolts from the courtroom through the window. The world of pretending vanishes at that instant. Tom has chosen to do the moral thing and tell the truth, and now there are consequences. Real danger enters his life in the form of Injun Joe: Half the time Tom was afraid Injun Joe would never be captured; the other half he was afraid he would be. He felt sure he never could draw a safe breath again until that man was dead and he had seen the corpse.16

Tom Sawyer is no longer just the story of a “mischievous” boy playing pirate and bothering grown-ups. But Twain’s

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer transition from the picturesque and adventure-filled early sections of the novel to the plot-driven conclusion gracefully weaves together both elements. The last section, when everything is real and no longer just pretend, begins as Tom and Huck set out on a typical Tom Sawyer adventure. “There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure,” Twain writes at the beginning of Chapter 25, and it seems that the book is returning to its beginnings. But when the boys go seeking buried treasure, they actually find it, along with Injun Joe and real danger. The climax of Tom Sawyer brings together a number of plot strands and scenes that Twain weaves together with a deceptively easy narrative grace. As Tom and Huck are searching for buried treasure in a haunted house, Injun Joe, in disguise, and a companion enter the house. The boys hide, see them discover a chest of gold, overhear their plans, and finally escape (Chapter 26). What they have seen and heard forms the basis for detective work. Where will the men hide the gold? What exactly was Injun Joe talking about when he said he would not leave town until he got revenge on someone for something? In the midst of the gathering tension, Twain returns to the world of boys and girls. Becky Thatcher persuades her mother to let her invite all her friends to a picnic, and off they all go to explore a cave after lunch. Becky and Tom wander deeper into the cave than the others, and when everyone leaves on the ferry back to St. Petersburg after nightfall, no one notices that Becky and Tom are not among them. From the shore, Huck Finn—outcast that he is, he has not been invited to the picnic—sees the ferry heading home. He is waiting to follow Injun Joe and his companion, and when they emerge from a temperance tavern (which

The Plot and Its Relation to the Story secretly serves whiskey), he follows them to Widow Douglas’s garden. There he discovers that Injun Joe intends to mutilate Widow Douglas in revenge for her dead husband’s having had Joe horsewhipped in the past. Huck runs to a nearby house, tells Mr. Jones, a “Welchman” (Welshman, a native of Wales), what he has overheard, but begs, for fear, that the Welchman not reveal who told him of it (Chapter 29). With his sons, the Welchman surprises Injun Joe and his companion in the garden and saves the widow, but the culprits get away. Consequntly, danger still waits for the boys, but for Tom there is another twist, although Huck does not know of it. Tom is lost with Becky in the cave. That misadventure, because of Tom’s ingenuity, leads to the climax and resolution of the plot as Twain plants Injun Joe and the treasure in the cave.

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4 Characters and Characterization

PLOT AND CHARACTER, it has already been suggested, are

inextricably bound to each other. They influence each other. The plot shows how characters respond to the unfolding events of the story and consequently how characters influence the way events unfold; the action of the characters forms the plot. A story happens to someone. A plot is caused by someone; it maps how someone responds to the events of the story, as in E.M Forster’s example of “The king died and then the queen died of grief.” There can be neither story nor plot without characters. Usually,

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Characters and Characterization the characters are people, although they need not be. The characters in a story can just as well be animals or even things, but those animals or things or fantasy creatures are the characters of the story and are inevitably invested with human traits. They act like people and have human motives and characteristics to elicit from the reader the sympathies or antipathies (dislikes) which usually are directed toward people, even if the character is a spider or a dragon or a bear or a pancake or a mongoose. To begin with, a character is simply a name: Tom Sawyer, Aunt Polly, Becky Thatcher, Huckleberry Finn, Joe Harper, Mrs. Harper, Judge Thatcher, Injun Joe, Muff Potter, Widow Douglas, Mr. Jones the Welchman, or Amy Lawrence. The author, then, has to give shape and life to the name—he must animate it with specific characteristics or traits; that is the craft of characterization. But not all characters in a novel need to be equally developed. Amy Lawrence, for example, is a plot device rather than a person. She is the girl Tom once had chosen as a girlfriend and to whom he becomes indifferent once he sees Becky Thatcher. We never see their romance. Twain only refers to it in passing. We do see Tom momentarily make use of Amy as he chats with her in order to make Becky jealous. We get a glimpse of Amy’s humiliation when she is spurned a second time, yet it is of no consequence to the story or to the reader (Chapter 18). Amy’s story is not followed, nor is a personality constructed for her. The reader is just as indifferent to her as Tom is. She has no life in the book or in the reader’s imagination, and she is not very likely to remain in the reader’s memory upon closing the book. Aunt Polly, on the other hand, is a figure with some definition. She has a set of fixed characteristics, and yet she is

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer a caricature rather than a character. She is crusty but warm, both stern and soft-hearted. She can be counted on to react the same identifiable way in situation after situation, and her predictable responses can, nevertheless, move the reader. She weeps with joy at being loved, and the reader shares her response. E.M. Forster calls her type of character a “flat character.” It is not a term meant to lessen the character’s value. It merely describes how she is created, how she will act, and what the reader can expect from her. Injun Joe is also a flat character. He is a frightening and brutal figure, dangerous and violent. His pure evil and his brutality cannot surprise us, nor does the narration of his painful end, in Chapter 33, soften us toward him. Twain makes sure of that by reiterating Injun Joe’s many outrages and crimes when he recounts Joe’s pathetic death in the cave. Twain, moreover, spends a few sentences to mock the “sappy women” with “permanently impaired and leaky water-works” who would have “implore[d the governor] to be a merciful ass” and spare Injun Joe’s hanging had he been captured alive. It is as if the narrator is making sure that the reader regards Injun Joe as a plot device rather than as a person to pity. Injun Joe’s only function, as a flat character, is to provide a fearsome adversary for Tom and Huck. Tom, even though he is a stereotypical boy, is also an individual and a fully rounded character. He can surprise the reader, and not just through his misadventures. He is capable of having conflicting feelings, thoughts, and desires, and he is capable of responding to the situations that confront him according to the needs of the situation and according to his own complex nature. His responses set the direction of the story. He is brazen, he fibs, and he “hooks” things. He is also tender, and he cries; he will not bear false witness, and it goes against his conscience to

Characters and Characterization steal. He is mischievous, venturesome, and hungry for fame and glory, and that makes him vain sometimes, as when, in Chapter 4, he fraudulently “wins” a Bible in Sunday school for the sake of becoming the center of attention.17 But when he does become the center of attention in that episode, it is a deflating experience, rather than a glorifying one, because his ruse is exposed. He rebounds quickly, however. In fact the narrator draws “the curtain of charity” over the scene before its humiliating conclusion. This is not only an act of charity to Tom, but the author’s way of controlling our response to him. What emerges from reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a sense of Tom as resilient, plucky, heroic, loyal—even if self-centered—fundamentally upright, and generous. He is never at a loss despite the predicaments he falls into. Perhaps more importantly, he has an inner life. He broods about things as we have seen him do by the water’s edge after the broken sugar bowl incident or at Aunt Polly’s bedside as she sleeps. These qualities are shown to develop in him as the story unfolds and as he responds to its events. Tom is aware, for example, of Huck’s painful sense of isolation from the rest of the community, and he tries to lessen it. He cares about Becky, and he is unable to allow Muff Potter to suffer injustice and be punished for a murder he did not commit, even if he puts himself at risk. Tom is never in conflict with himself the way Huck is. He can simply switch back and forth among the several roles he is able to play: from the mischievous boy playing outlaw to the respectable boy in fundamental agreement with the values of his community. HOW CHARACTERS ARE PRESENTED In addition to constructing several types of characters—

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer simple or flat, round or complex—in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Twain also presents his characters in a number of ways. About Huckleberry Finn, for example, he writes: [He] came and went, at his own free will. He slept on doorsteps in fine weather and in empty hogsheads in wet; he did not have to go to school or to church, or call any being master or obey anybody; he could go fishing or swimming when and where he chose, and stay as long as it suited him; nobody forbade him to fight; he could sit up as late as he pleased; he was always the first boy that went barefoot in the spring and the last to resume leather in the fall; he never had to wash, nor put on clean clothes; he could swear wonderfully. In a word, everything that goes to make life precious that boy had. So thought every harassed, hampered, respectable boy in St. Petersburg.18

This sort of description is a sketch of the character drawn entirely from outside the character. It tells us the conditions surrounding a character and tells us what life is like for the character. Like a photograph, it does not get inside the character, nor does it actually give us a picture of a character in action. Huck is, as it were, caught standing still and is described as if he were the subject of a lecture that the narrator is delivering with a pointer. The narrator is talking about the character. A character can also be seen from the outside, but as if caught in the act. Twain introduces Aunt Polly, in Chapter 1, this way, “The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about the room; then she put them up and looked out under them. She seldom or never looked through them.” In this case, the character is not standing still but is represented by a series of gestures, as in a movie,

Characters and Characterization and the reader is likely to get a sense of the character in motion because of the life-likeness of the gestures. Rather than talking about Aunt Polly, the narrator is actually showing her in a typical and defining action, looking sharp but not seeing clearly, determined but flustered. Nevertheless, Aunt Polly is still being presented from the outside. An omniscient narrator can get inside a character and describe what a character is thinking. Twain gets inside Tom’s head when he shows Tom luxuriating in his misery after being unjustly punished for breaking the sugar bowl or when he describes Tom sitting on the tree box the morning he has to whitewash the fence. He also does this when he reveals Becky Thatcher’s state of mind on the morning of Tom’s funeral: In the afternoon Becky Thatcher found herself moping about the deserted school-house yard, and feeling very melancholy. But she found nothing there to comfort her. She soliloquized: “Oh, if I only had a brass andiron-knob again! But I haven’t got anything now to remember him by.” And she choked back a little sob. Presently she stopped, and said to herself: “It was right here. Oh, if it was to do over again, I wouldn’t say that—I wouldn’t say it for the whole world. But he’s gone now; I’ll never, never, never see him any more.”

ON YOUR OWN ACTIVITY #7

The narrator of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is so very present in the book that he may be thought of as one of the book’s characters even though he is not. In a short essay, draw a character stretch of the narrator.

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer This thought broke her down, and she wandered away, with tears rolling down her cheeks.19

Characters can also be revealed by what other characters say about them—when they are described by other characters—but under such circumstances there are two characters being revealed, the one speaking as well as the one spoken of. For example, when Tom, Joe, and Huck suddenly appear in the middle of their own funeral service in Chapter 17, “Aunt Polly, Mary, and the Harpers threw themselves upon their restored ones, smothered them with kisses and poured out thanksgivings,” actions perfectly in tune with their characters as loving family members. Then, Twain moves the spotlight away from them onto “poor Huck [who] stood abashed and uncomfortable, not knowing exactly what to do or where to hide from so many unwelcoming eyes. He wavered, and started to slink away.” This is a touching description of Huck’s circumstance that defines him as a character—he is a lone boy without a mother, whose drunken father is unconcerned about him. He is necessarily uncertain about his place in the world because of his circumstances, because he is an outsider, and he “slinks” out of the way. He bears some shame. So far, it is the narrator who has been describing him. But Twain uses Huck’s predicament to further define Tom. Tom seizes Huck and says: “Aunt Polly, it ain’t fair. Somebody’s got to be glad to see Huck.” Because of Twain’s description, we know about Huck’s place in the scene. Because of Tom’s comment, we see Huck standing uncomfortably alone, we can sense his feeling—at least as Tom imagines it—and we hear that Aunt Polly’s earlier comment about Tom’s good-heartedness is true. Tom cares about Huck and about fairness. Then Twain shifts

Characters and Characterization the spotlight back again onto Aunt Polly and reinforces her character; she says what we expect she would say, “And so they shall. I’m glad to see him, poor motherless thing!” But that is not the end, for Twain, although he knows how to bring sentiment into his story, is not a sentimentalist. Huck is complicated, and Twain reveals the next level of Huck’s character. The descriptive burden is once again the narrator’s: “the loving attentions Aunt Polly lavished upon him were the one thing capable of making him more uncomfortable than he was before.” Voice—what a character says and the way it is said, such as Tom’s remark about Huck—is also a way of characterization. And it can be more immediately revealing and effective than simple narrative description. In the preceding example, voice is mixed with narrative description to reveal the characters. It is worth looking at a passage of pure speech to see how subtly Twain can make a point about a character without even seeming to. Widow Douglas, on the morning after the Welchman routed Injun Joe and his partner from her property and saved her from attack, asks him, “Why didn’t you come and wake me?” He answers, “We judged it warn’t worth while. Those fellows warn’t likely to come again ... what was the use of waking you up and scaring you to death? My three negro men stood guard at your house all the rest of the night.”20 That the man is sturdy, virtuous, and considerate is shown in the content of his speech, but the fundamental decency of his character is conveyed through his use of the phrase “my three negro men” [italics added] rather than the term of common denigration habitually employed to refer to blacks by the rest of the characters in the novel. Character is revealed not only by how characters

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer describe each other but by the way they are characterized in relation to each other. Tom’s half-brother Sid, for example, is hardly an active character in Tom Sawyer. Rather, he is a prop the narrator uses to reinforce the reader’s appreciation of Tom, for despite the fact that Tom is often mischievous and disobedient, those traits are an advantage when contrasted with Sid, who is rather a model boy, a “goodygoody” and a tattle-tale, whose goodness has a reek of hypocrisy and self-serving righteousness. The reader, Twain makes certain, can find more virtue in Tom’s “badness” than in Sid’s “goodness.” Tom and Huck best illustrate how characters can define each other by the way they contrast. Both are strong characters and although they may seem to be similar types at the start of the story—boys more fond of wild adventure than social responsibility—it becomes clear by the end of the book how significantly different they are. Tom, as has been noted, is a less complex character than Huck. Good-hearted but self-centered, Tom’s sense of himself is as a hero, but deep down he is a conformist who likes to play games, who pretends to be an outlaw. He has a healthy appetite for adventure and self-assertion, but he is comfortable in society and believes in it. Huck, on the other hand, is more inward, just as good-hearted but withdrawn, and he is more fundamentally in conflict with society and with himself. He is truly an outsider, and his alienation is not a game but reflects the way he is. As much as he might want to be socially acceptable, he cannot accept the constraints that would make him so, and he wants just as much, perhaps even more, to be free of society than to be a part of it. Consider the conclusion of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, after the boys have found the gold and Huck has been accepted into the community. He cannot stand his new

Characters and Characterization life at Widow Douglas’s house, and after three weeks of bearing “his miseries ... one day turned up missing.” Everyone searches for him and they even drag the river. Finally, Tom Sawyer, characteristically, went poking among some old empty hogsheads down behind the abandoned slaughter-house, and in one of them he found the refugee. Huck had slept there; he had just breakfasted upon some stolen odds and ends of food, and was lying off, now, in comfort, with his pipe. He was unkempt, uncombed, and clad in the same old ruin of rags that had made him picturesque in the days when he was free and happy.21

Tom’s response is not what the preceding chapters of the book might lead a reader to expect. He does not approve. He argues for conformity and respectability against Huck’s liberty: Tom routed him out, told him the trouble he had been causing, and urged him to go home. Huck’s face lost its tranquil content, and took a melancholy cast. He said: “Don’t talk about it, Tom. I’ve tried it, and it don’t work; it don’t work, Tom. It ain’t for me; I ain’t used to it. The widder’s good to me, and friendly; but I can’t stand them ways. She makes me get up just at the same time every morning; she makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder; she won’t let me sleep in the wood-shed; I got to wear them blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don’t seem to any air git through ’em, somehow; and they’re so rotten nice that I can’t set down, nor lay down, nor roll around anywhers; I hain’t slid on a cellar-door for—well, it ’pears to be years; I got to go to church and sweat and sweat—I hate them ornery sermons! I can’t ketch a fly in there, I can’t chaw, I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell;

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer she gits up by a bell—everything’s so awful reg’lar a body can’t stand it.”22

These are the complaints it seemed Tom had been feeling throughout the novel. The reader can even recall Tom’s restlessness in church at not being able to seize the fly that has settled on the pew in front of him and is rubbing its wings as Tom had to endure the boring service. Now Tom’s response to Huck is, “Well, everybody does that way, Huck.” Huck responds: Tom, it don’t make no difference. I ain’t everybody, and I can’t stand it. It’s awful to be tied up so.... I got to ask to go a-fishing; I got to ask to go in a-swimming—dern’d if I hain’t got to ask to do everything.... The widder wouldn’t let me smoke; she wouldn’t let me yell, she wouldn’t let me gape, nor stretch, nor scratch, before folks.... And dad fetch it, she prayed all the time! I never see such a woman! I had to shove, Tom—I just had to. And besides, that school’s going to open, and I’d a had to go to it—well, I wouldn’t stand that, Tom.23

Huck’s words fall on deaf ears. Tom, it turns out, is “everybody.” “[I]f you’ll try this thing just a while longer you’ll come to like it,” he argues. But Huck won’t have it: “[T]he way I’d like a hot stove if I was to set on it long enough,” he says. “I like the woods, and the river, and hogsheads, and I’ll stick to ’em, too. Blame it all! Just as we’d got guns, and a cave, and all just fixed to rob, here this

ON YOUR OWN ACTIVITY #8

Compare and contrast Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

Characters and Characterization dern foolishness has got to come up and spile it all!” This is the difference between Huck and Tom. Huck takes Tom’s talk of adventure seriously. For Tom, it is only a game. Tom now uses the lure of being an outlaw, of playing at being an outlaw, to draw Huck back into society: “Lookyhere, Huck, being rich ain’t going to keep me back from turning robber.” “No! Oh, good-licks; are you in real dead-wood earnest, Tom?” “Just as dead earnest as I’m a-sitting here.”

But Tom is not in earnest: “Huck,” Tom says, “we can’t let you into the gang if you ain’t respectable.”

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5 Setting: The World of Tom Sawyer

WHEN WE TALK about a novel’s setting, we are actually refer-

ring to two aspects of the novel: (1) its geographical and topographical setting, the physical landscape or succession of landscapes in which the action takes place; and (2) the more intangible habits, values, assumptions, and culture which form the background for the actions of the characters. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer takes place on the American southwestern frontier around the late 1830s to early 1840s. Written in the middle 1870s on the East Coast, it offers an urban vision of pastoral simplicity. The novel provides a map

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Setting:The World of Tom Sawyer of a simpler time. In Chapter 4, Mark Twain describes St. Petersburg, the town in Missouri where Tom lives, as a place where “the sun [rises] upon a tranquil world, and beam[s] down upon [a] peaceful village.” Its topography is defined by hills and valleys. Houses not yet numbered are set in lanes not yet named, nor have they yet become streets. A “dense” and “pathless” wood verges on the town, which sits on the shore of the great Mississippi River. The graveyard is “of the old-fashioned Western kind. It was on a hill, about a mile and a half from the village. It had a crazy board fence around it, which leaned inward in places, and outward the rest of the time, but stood upright nowhere.”24 It is a landscape which allows the unconstrained, unfettered movement of both the body and the imagination for a boy and demands a firm work ethic and a restraining self-discipline against the tendency to either wildness or laziness for an adult. The landscape of the novel is the open, natural space of a land at the early stages of habitation and development. It indicates a place where neither the green world nor the urban world has assumed predominance and both vie for authority. The setting is one where the challenge and the mystery of nature compete with the rule and order of civilization. The boys can play hooky from the one-room

ON YOUR OWN ACTIVITY #9

Setting in Tom Sawyer is an integral, indeed, a necessary and essential part of the action. Tom’s adventures have the force and the meaning they have because of their settings. Choose four separate episodes in Tom Sawyer and discuss the role played in each by its setting.

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer schoolhouse on the shore of the Mississippi River and swim naked in its waters or “hook” a skiff and venture out to a small uninhabited island downstream. They can steal into the graveyard at night and shudder with excitement at the sense of an eerie world. The landscape is full of natural wonders, like the cave that almost becomes a tomb for Tom and Becky. It actually does become a tomb for Injun Joe. The world of the novel is both wonderful and dangerous, and, as such, it makes demands upon the human character that call upon the cultivation of moral judgment, cooperation, boldness, and ingenuity. Inside this larger encompassing setting of the novel, there are also particular settings: the graveyard; the cave; the courtroom; the jail; the church, “a small, plain affair, with a sort of pine board tree-box on top of it for a steeple,” a “cracked bell,” and “high-backed, uncushioned pews”; the “isolated frame schoolhouse”; or the haunted house, “a weed-grown, floorless ... unplastered” place with “an ancient fireplace, vacant windows, a ruinous staircase; and here, there, and everywhere hung ragged and abandoned cobwebs.”25 As much as the geographical landscape provides the background for Tom’s adventures, the intangible setting provides the context for those adventures. Twain not only describes the physical church, schoolhouse, or courtroom, but he spends much more time describing the acts of going

ON YOUR OWN ACTIVITY #10

Write a synopsis of an adaptation of Tom Sawyer that places the action in a contemporary urban setting rather than a nineteenth-century rural setting.

Setting:The World of Tom Sawyer to church or going to school or having a trial. He shows what goes on inside the buildings: the words of the preacher, the behavior of the teacher, the composition and demeanor of the congregation or the schoolchildren, the workings of the judicial procedure. Against the background of moral beliefs, cultural rites, and behavioral expectations, Tom’s actions become interesting and meaningful. In context, Tom’s craving for adventure is not only the inherent behavior of a typical boy, but a consequence of the tedium, constraints, and demands of conforming to social propriety that Tom has to endure. As can be seen most vividly by Huck’s response to life at Widow Douglas’s house, setting conveys an attitude toward life and an expectation about behavior as much as it describes a location, a landscape, or a set of concrete circumstances or social behaviors.

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6 Themes and Symbols

WHEN WE TALK of the theme of a novel, we are referring to

what the novel is about, its subject. And when we say that a novel is “about” something, the word about can have several meanings. We may be referring to the particulars of a story: Tom Sawyer is about a boy who searches for adventure and about the adventures he finds and how they affect him. We may also be referring to an idea or set of ideas that emerges from the parts of the story taken as a whole and which holds the book together. In order to determine what the theme of a novel is, therefore, we must interpret the parts of the novel and, by doing so, draw

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Themes and Symbols some meaning from them. Obviously, we read at one level simply for pleasure and excitement, for the story, the plot, the characters, and the setting. But we also read for enlightenment, to learn about the world, how people behave, what constitutes virtue and vice, what forces seem to govern human thought and human behavior—and discovering things like that in our reading can also be a source of pleasure and excitement. We might then say of Tom Sawyer that, besides being an adventure/detective story, it is about the conflict between two forces: the unrestrained wildness of nature and socially imposed restraint upon ourselves. This conflict is seen in the character of Tom Sawyer, which develops because of that necessary restraint: a conflict between daring and obedience, between rebellion and respectability, between selfinterest and social awareness. If a novel offers a conflict as its theme, as Tom Sawyer does, we may also look to see whether the novel offers any solution to the conflict or means of handling it. In Tom Sawyer, the solution to that conflict between nature and restraint seems to be the process of imaginative play. By means of his imagination, Tom engages the natural world and gives vent to the drive of his own adventurous nature. At the same time, he does not really abandon the values and the curbs established by social rules. This interpretation helps make sense of Tom’s response to Huck at the end of the novel, when Tom suddenly argues for conformity and respectability, and furthermore argues that respectability is essential for membership in his gang of outlaws. Perhaps the last thing that a novelist wants to be accused of is preaching and no reader wants to be subjected to being told how things are or what to do, what to think, and how to behave. At the same time, writers often have ideas that

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer they want to advance about just these issues. They have their own vision of the world and of human nature and experiences they want to share—that is what often moves them to write in the first place. Readers, too, often look to writers to help them make sense of the world, of experience, and of human nature. Readers want to learn something from what they read, to come away from a book with a sense of having accomplished something, of having grown, of having gained a greater understanding of themselves and others. We wish to broaden our vision, our perspective, our perception. Rather than preach, therefore, a writer can show. A reader, rather than squirming at a lecture, can thrill to an experience. Thus, often when a writer describes something, shows something, he or she is also using that particular description symbolically, hoping the reader will see deeper, will recognize that what is being described is also referring to something else. Writers and readers, thus, are often collaborators in the development of a subtext, where an event in the text takes on a secondary meaning that is revealed through interpretation. Content that is shown on the surface can also be symbolic and can represent something else—an idea, for example. In Tom Sawyer, the theme of the conflict between nature and restraint is worked throughout the novel by the interplay of the parts of the novel. Twain, the

ON YOUR OWN ACTIVITY #11

One of the major themes in Tom Sawyer is the conflict between conforming to socially accepted ways of living and ignoring or even rebelling against them. In a short essay, discuss how this conflict exists in your life.

Themes and Symbols visible narrator, never steps forward or even quietly intrudes to say what his theme is. He presents an episode of unhoused boys who experience a mighty tempest in one scene, and he shows them making a fire afterwards. He shows the bold and cooperative response of the Welchman and his sons to Injun Joe’s malevolence. Against the chaos of nature, the order of church and school become necessary. When an entire work can be read as signifying a secondary meaning which a decoded reading of the apparent story suggests, that work is a symbolic work called an allegory. A work in its entirety, however, does not have to be allegorical in order to have symbolic elements. It can be quite realistic and yet still have parts that suggest that an event signifies more than what is described on the surface. Consider, for example, the storm in Chapter 26 of Tom Sawyer. It is a terrific description rendered from two perspectives, the objective occurrence and its subjective effect. A furious blast roared through the trees, making everything sing as it went. One blinding flash after another came, and peal on peal of deafening thunder. And now a drenching rain poured down and the rising hurricane drove it in sheets along the ground.... Under the ceaseless conflagration of lightning that flamed in the skies, everything below stood out in cleancut and shadowless distinctness: the bending trees, the billowy river, white with foam, the driving spray of spume-flakes, the dim outlines of the high bluffs on the other side, glimpsed through the drifting cloud-rack and the slanting veil of rain. Every little while some giant tree yielded the fight and fell crashing through the younger growth; and the unflagging thunder-peals came now in ear-splitting explosive bursts, keen and sharp, and unspeakably appalling. The storm

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer culminated in one matchless effort that seemed likely to tear the island to pieces, burn it up, drown it to the tree-tops, blow it away, and deafen every creature in it, all at one and the same moment.

Although Twain’s description of the storm is superb scene painting, the description of the storm does more than just create a setting for action. The storm is an action itself. It is what nature does, how nature acts. The storm is, therefore, like a character in the novel. It has a life of its own, as real storms seem to have sometimes. Beyond that, however, the storm has additional significance. Twain is not only rendering a storm in his description, he is providing a representation of nature in one of its aspects—the uncontrollable, furious wildness of which it is often capable. This kind of representation in literature, where a whole—nature—is represented by a part—a storm—is called synecdoche. Twain is, by the literary device of synecdoche, presenting nature’s threat and the challenge it represents to us. The fact that ferocity, too, besides the sunny tranquil world we have already seen, is an aspect of nature, indicates that discipline, knowledge, self-restraint, and social cooperation are necessary for human survival. Twain’s description of the boys’ response to the storm, in fact, symbolically conveys this very idea. Intermixed with the description of the storm, Twain describes the boys’ reactions: They clung together in terror ... [and] cried out to each other, but the roaring wind and the booming thunder-blasts drowned their voices utterly. However, one by one they straggled in at last and took shelter under the tent, cold, scared, and streaming with water; but to have company in misery seemed something to be grateful for. They could not talk, the old sail flapped

Themes and Symbols so furiously, even if the other noises would have allowed them. The tempest rose higher and higher, and presently the sail tore loose from its fastenings and went winging away on the blast. The boys seized each others’ hands and fled, with many tumblings and bruises, to the shelter of a great oak that stood upon the river-bank. Now the battle was at its highest.... It was a wild night for homeless young heads to be out in.26

In the wake of the storm, the boys take each others’ hands and seek shelter, and after the storm, most significantly, they kindle a fire. This action is entirely realistic. Yet these actions also represent human responses to nature and suggest that the aspect of nature that the storm represents—ferocity and wildness—justifies the society from which the boys sought escape. Just as the storm suggests the need for a cultivated intelligence—how to kindle fire—and social cooperation, its very fury and destructive power indicates that the social response must have the ruggedness and daring that mark Tom Sawyer’s character and cause his frequent conflicts with social authority. Otherwise, the effort at civilizing can undermine the human balance by too great a process of taming the human temperament.

ON YOUR OWN ACTIVITY #12

In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, not only are there symbolic elements in the story—the Widow Douglas, for example, represents social constraint for Huck—but Tom, in his quest for adventure, uses his imagination when he plays to give everyday things symbolic meaning. Describe some of these imaginative transformations which occur when Tom pretends something is something else.

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer This over-civilization is clearly demonstrated by Twain’s mockery of the florid prose compositions he excerpts “without alteration” from a volume entitled “Prose and Poetry, by a Western Lady,” in Chapter 21. The overly delicate prose suggests—symbolizes—the social suppression of animal spirits, a taming of the earthy parts of human nature that goes too far. Throughout the novel, Twain is continually readjusting the balance between nature and restraint. For him, the solution to the conflict is not the victory of either, but the tension created by the interplay of both. The restraining, even oppressive, discipline of church and school is necessary, but so is the spunky rebellion against them which Tom embodies. The aspects of the novel which suggest the themes are not the only parts that may have a symbolic dimension. Characters inside the world of Tom Sawyer, since they are often stereotypes, also can signify a concept or a universal human character trait as well as be dramatic creations embodying particular human beings. Aunt Polly, as has been noted, looks over her spectacles for Tom and then below them, but not through them. Not only is Twain giving us a picture of her in action and characterizing her, but her action also symbolizes something about her character. Aunt Polly is often blind to what is going on. She looks above or below, but not at a problem or situation. After Tom finishes whitewashing the fence, she rewards him with an apple and a sermon on the value of work. She is so set on looking at the ideal that she does not see Tom “hook a doughnut” in Chapter 3. In this way, Aunt Polly is not only a character in the book, but she also embodies a characteristic which might apply to people in general and, consequently, she has a symbolic dimension. Landscape, too, can be symbolic. Undeveloped nature,

Themes and Symbols the wild country around the town of St. Petersburg and the great Mississippi River, presents an emptiness where humanity can fall into a moral void and become brutal like Injun Joe or wayward like Huck Finn. Although Huck is by no means comparable to Injun Joe—he is an inward, unsure boy who treasures his own freedom but has a sense of concern for others and recognizes mutual obligation—we know that his father is a brutal, lawless drunkard. The condition of either Injun Joe or Huck, one because it represents evil and the other because it represents an apparently unguided state of nature, threatens to undermine the possibilities for civic association and individual industriousness. Against these threats, Tom Sawyer shows the cultural effort to impose civilizing forces to temper and control the power of nature as well as some of the discontents which accompany those efforts.

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7 Afterword

SOME GOOD THINGS do not come to an end. A novel that we

have read and enjoyed continues to live in our memory. We can replay its scenes, recall its characters, refer to its ideas and values, and even apply them to our own situations. Best of all, we can re-read novels as many times as we like, often finding later readings more richly rewarding than the first reading. Especially because we are not driven by the constant pressure to know what is going to happen next, we can enjoy all the more watching it happen. It is like watching a foreign film once we know the language it is in, seeing the entire picture within the

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Afterword frame rather than being forced to focus too much attention exclusively on the bottom of the screen in order to read the subtitles. A novel may also continue to exist not only in our recollection or re-reading but through a sequel. Twain suggests the possibility with regard to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer at the conclusion of the book. Stepping forward, separating himself from the narrative, and addressing the reader in his own person as the author, as he did in the Preface, Twain says: So endeth this chronicle. It being strictly a history of a boy, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man.... Most of the characters that perform in this book still live, and are prosperous and happy. Some day it may seem worth while to take up the story of the younger ones again and see what sort of men and women they turned out to be; therefore it will be wisest not to reveal any of that part of their lives at present.

In fact, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer has three sequels. The most famous, and the most remarkable, is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In Huckleberry Finn, instead of making Tom Sawyer a companion in Huck’s adventures, Twain introduces Jim, an adult runaway slave as his companion. Instead of having the fantasy adventures of boyhood, Huck and Jim are cast on a dark and perilous journey on a raft on the Mississippi River. Thus, when Twain does “take up the story” again, it is not to “see what sort of men and women [his characters] turned out to be.” He continues to write about a boy’s adventures, but with a dimension and a depth far greater than exists in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

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68

Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Tom Sawyer’s role in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is greatly diminished. He appears in the early chapters of the book in his usual role, as the organizer of imaginary games, and in the last episode. In that last episode, while his character is recognizably the same as what it was in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, it is shown in an entirely different light. His heroic endeavor to save Jim from being re-enslaved is only apparently heroic. He can only play the role of liberator at Jim’s expense, for he knows what Huck, Jim, Aunt Sally, and Uncle Silas do not know, that Miss Watson has, in fact, already freed Jim, that Jim is not a slave. Since Tom does not reveal it because he is set upon having an “adventure,” Jim remains a prisoner, Tom’s prisoner, really. Therefore, Tom is not just a mischievous boy in this book. He exploits Jim for his own gratification and aggrandizement. His game is no longer mischievous or

ON YOUR OWN ACTIVITY #13

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain continues the story he began in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, using many of the same characters. But Huckleberry Finn is a very different book from Tom Sawyer. It is a more difficult book, and it shows a darker side of humanity, and probes deeper issues than Tom Sawyer. Although he appears in it, Tom Sawyer appears only briefly at the beginning and then, at the end of the book, in the last episode, which begins in Chapter 31 of Huckleberry Finn. There, he plays a major role. Beginning at Chapter 31, read to the end of Huckleberry Finn and compare the character of Tom there with the Tom of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and contrast the kind of adventures he has in both books.

Afterword innocent. Tom is responsible for Jim’s imprisonment because Jim’s oppression is necessary for Tom’s “heroism.” The most significant difference between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, however, is a narrative difference. It is not Tom who finally supplants Twain as the narrator of his adventures—it is Huckleberry Finn. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a first-person account. There is no longer an omniscient narrator. Huck tells the tale, and in this way the reader is taken inside Huck’s consciousness, becomes intimately involved with his development, and is rewarded with the colorful richness of his dialect. Twain published two other sequels after Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective.27 Huckleberry Finn continues as the narrator in both these books, but they are hardly as well known as the first two, although they are entirely worthy works. Even if they do not show the originality of the first book or the scope of the second book, they are highly imaginative creations. Tom Sawyer Abroad begins with a fantastic ride in a balloon, as Huck, Tom, and Jim sail across the North American continent and the Atlantic Ocean to world-wide adventures, winding up on Mt. Sinai (in Egypt), captives of the mad genius who invented the balloon. The story does not attempt to reach the depth of Huckleberry Finn, but rather may be seen as a brilliant animated cartoon and a vehicle for presenting characters that had become beloved.

ON YOUR OWN ACTIVITY #14

Choose an adventure novel with which you are familiar and compare and contrast it to Tom Sawyer.

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Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Tom Sawyer, Detective, likewise, does not attempt the depths of Huckleberry Finn, but is, in fact, a detective story based on a real case history from Sweden, of robbery and murder, which Twain adapted and set in Missouri. Aunt Polly, Aunt Sally, and Uncle Silas all reappear. Of course, so do Tom and Huck. More than the inventiveness of their plots, the charm of Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective resides in the conversations between Huck, Tom, and Jim in their predictable roles—Jim, good natured, wise but unworldly, and solid; Tom, ingenious, self-aggrandizing, and heroic; Huck Finn, noble, independent, and full of humble admiration for Tom, who, now freed from the dark seriousness of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is just about worthy of it.

WORKS BY MARK TWAIN The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, 1867 The Innocents Abroad, 1869. Roughing It, 1972. The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, 1873. Sketches New and Old, 1875. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876. Old Times on the Mississippi, 1876. A True Story and the Recent Carnival of Crime, 1877. Punch, Brothers, Punch! and other Sketches, 1878. A Tramp Abroad, 1880. 1601: Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors, 1880. The Prince and the Pauper, 1882. Life on the Mississippi, 1883. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 1889. The American Claimant, 1892. Merry Tales, 1892. The £1,000,000 Bank Note and Other New Stories, 1893. Tom Sawyer Abroad, 1894. Pudd’n’head Wilson, 1894. Tom Sawyer, Detective, 1896. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, 1896. How to Tell a Story and Other Essays, 1897. Following the Equator, 1897. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, 1900. Edmund Burke on Croker and Tammany, 1901. A Double Barrelled Detective Story, 1902. A New Crime Legislation Needed, 1903. A Dog’s Tale, 1904. King Leopold’s Soliloquy, 1905. The War Prayer, 1905.

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WORKS BY MARK TWAIN

The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories, 1906. What Is Man?, 1906. Christian Science, 1907. Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, 1909. Letters from Earth, 1909. The Mysterious Stranger, 1916. Mark Twain’s Autobiography, 1924 (published posthumously).

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NOTES 1.

Website: www.twainquotes.com/ ClemensJM.html.

10.

Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Chapter 1.

2.

E.B. and K.S. White, A Subtreasury of American Humor. New York: The Modern Library, 1941, p. xxii.

11.

Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Chapter 5.

12.

E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1927, p. 86.

13.

Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Chapter 6.

14.

Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Chapter 14.

15.

Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Chapter 17.

16.

Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Chapter 24.

17.

It is ironic, and telling, that although Tom cannot learn one verse of scripture by heart, he can recite long memorized passages from the book when he plays Robin Hood.

18.

Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Chapter 6.

19.

Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Chapter 17.

20.

Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Chapter 30.

Mark Twain, “The Noble Red Man,” Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays 1852–1890. New York: Library of America, 1992, pp. 442–446. Also posted on the Web in an abbreviated form: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ railton/projects/rissetto/ redman.htm.

21.

Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Chapter 35.

22.

Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Chapter 35.

23.

Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Chapter 35.

24.

Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Chapter 9.

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. New York: The Modern Library, 2001, Chapter 1.

25.

Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Chapter 26.

26.

Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Chapter 16.

3.

Website: www.twainquotes.com/ ClemensJane.html.

4.

Aretta L. Watts, “Mark Twain’s Gay Mother,” New York Times, February 5, 1928 Website; www.twainquotes.com/ 19280205.html.

5.

Aretta L. Watts, “Mark Twain’s Gay Mother,” New York Times, February 5, 1928; Website: www.twainquotes.com/ 19280205.html.

6.

Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi. New York: Signet Classics, 2001, Chapter 4.

7.

Website: http://yorku.ca/ twainweb/reviews/aud-part.html. Also: Mark Twain, “Mark Twain on Artemus Ward,” The Albany Evening Journal, November 29, 1871; Website: www.etext. lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/ public/TwaArt2.html.

8.

9.

74 27.

NOTES Mark Twain began a third sequel, “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians,” perhaps in the summer of 1884. The date of composition is unsure. He wrote 15,000 words and then abandoned it. It is a bitter work in which the three characters set out for Utah and confront violent and brutal Indian assaults against a generous and loving pioneer family who have befriended them. The story seems to reflect Twain’s actual attitude at the time toward Indians, which is evident in his treatment of Injun Joe in Tom

Sawyer, and which he expresses with some venom in a short essay he published in 1870 called “The Noble Red Man” (see bibliography). “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians” was first published in Life magazine in 1968. Lee Nelson, a writer of novels about Mormon life, then a student a Brigham Young University, saw it in Life and subsequently took it up and completed it. His version of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians was published in 2003 (Council Press).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

75

Forster, E.M. Aspects of the Novel. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1927. Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. New York: The Modern Library, 2001. Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi. New York: Signet Classics, 2001. Twain, Mark. “The Noble Red Man,” Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays 1852–1890. New York: Library of America, 1992, pp. 442–446. Also posted on the Web in an abbreviated form: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/projects/rissetto/redman.html. White, E.B. and K.S. A Subtreasury of American Humor. New York: The Modern Library, 1941.

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FURTHER READING

Aspiz, Harold. “Tom Sawyer’s Games of Death,” in Studies in the Novel 27, No. 2 (1995 Summer): pp. 141–153. Baldanza, Frank. “Boy Literature,” in Mark Twain: An Introduction and Interpretation, edited by John Mahoney, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961, pp. 103–123. Bassett, John E. “Tom, Huck, and the Young Pilot: Twain’s Quest for Authority,” in Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Culture 39, No. 1 (1985–1986 Winter): pp. 3–19. Blair, Walter. “Tom Sawyer,” in Mark Twain: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Henry Nash Smith, Prentice-Hall, 1963, pp. 64–82. Brown, Gillian. “Child’s Play,” in Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 11, no. 3 (1999–2000 Fall): pp. 76–106. Burde, Edgar J. “Slavery and the Boys: Tom Sawyer and the Germ of Huck Finn,” in American Literary Realism 24, No. 1 (1991 Fall): pp. 86–91. Byers, John R., Jr. “A Hannibal Summer: The Framework of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” in Studies in American Fiction (Boston, MA) 8, (1980): pp. 81–88. Fetterley, Judith. “Disenchantment: Tom Sawyer in Huckleberry Finn,” in PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 87, No. 1 (1972 January): p. 69–74. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Excavations,” in Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 92–93. Gerber, John C. “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” in Mark Twain, edited by David J. Nordloh, Twayne, 1988, pp. 67–77. Griswold, Jerry. “Desexualizing Tom Sawyer: What Really Happens in the Cave,” in Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres 2, no. 3–4 (1996): pp. 486–489 Hendler, Glenn. “Tom Sawyer’s Masculinity,” in Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 49, No. 4 (1993 Winter): p. 33–59 Knoenagel, Axel. “Mark Twain’s Further Use of Huck and Tom,” in International Fiction Review 19, No. 2 (1992): pp. 96–102. Maik, Thomas A. “The Village in Tom Sawyer: Myth and Reality,” in Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 42, no. 2 (1986 Summer): pp. 157–164.

FURTHER READING

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Messent, Peter. “Discipline and Punishment in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” in Journal of American Studies 32, No. 2 (1998 August): p. 219–235. Peck, Elizabeth G. “Tom Sawyer: Character in Search of an Audience,” in American Transcendental Quarterly 2, No. 3 (1988 September): p. 223–236 Thoreson, Trygve. “Aunt Polly’s Predicament,” in Studies in American Humor 5, No. 1 (1986 Spring): pp. 17–26.

78 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, (Twain), 70 compared to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 68–69 characters in, 67–69 darker side to humanity in, 68 narrative, 69 publication, 8 Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The (Twain) compared to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 68–69 cultural context, 11, 15, 54 historical context, 8–11, 13, 15, 54 heroism, 18 humor in, 4, 18 nostalgia, 16 publication, 8, 11 Bixby, Horace, 5 Brown, Charles Farrar. See Ward, Artemus Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches, The (Twain), 7 Characters in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer authenticity of, 1 Widow Douglas in, 41, 43, 49, 51, 57, 63 Huckleberry Finn in, 13–14, 19, 25, 30–32, 34, 36, 38–41, 43–46, 48–53, 57, 59, 63, 65 Joe Harper in, 13–14, 25, 31, 34–36, 38–41, 43, 48 Mrs. Harper in, 36–37, 43, 48 Injun Joe in, 11, 31–32, 39, 43–44, 49, 56, 61, 65 Mr. Jones in, 41, 43, 49, 61 Amy Lawrence in, 43 Aunt Polly in, 16–18, 30, 33, 36–37, 43, 45–49, 64 Muff Potter in, 31–32, 39, 43, 45 presentation, 45–53 Dr. Robinson, 26, 31–32, 39 Tom Sawyer in, 2, 4, 13–14, 16–26,

INDEX 28–41, 43–45, 47–53, 55–57, 59, 63–64 stereotypes, 64 Alfred Temple in, 29 Becky Thatcher in, 2, 25, 28–34, 37–41, 43, 45, 47, 56 Old Hoss Williams in, 31 Civil War, 5, 15 Clemens, Jane Lampton (mother) humor, 2–3 Clemens, John Marshall (father), 1 death, 2, 5 Clemens, Olivia Langdon (wife), 7 breakdown, 8 Clemens, Orion (brother), 5 Clemens, Samuel Langhorne. See Twain, Mark Finn, Huckleberry in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 13, 43 adventures, 19, 25, 30–32, 34, 36, 38–41, 44, 48 drawn from life, 14 isolation of, 40, 45–46, 48–53, 57, 59, 63, 65 compared to Tom Sawyer, 50–53 Forster, E.M. on characterization, 44 on the difference between story and plot, 27–29, 32, 42 Frazer, Laura Hawkins model for Becky Thatcher, 2 on Twain, 2–4 Gilded Age, The (Twain), 8 Halbrook, Hal, 6–7 Hannibal, Missouri childhood in 2–3, 5 as model setting for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 5, 11 Harper, Joe in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 13–14 adventures, 25, 30, 34–36, 38–39, 43 Injun Joe in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 11, 43

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INDEX death, 41, 44, 56 evil acts, 31–32, 39–41, 44, 49, 61, 65 Innocents Abroad, The (Twain), 7–8 Jefferson, Thomas, 8 “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” (Twain), 7 Jolliet, Louis, 9 Langdon, Charles, 7 Langdon, Jervis, 7 Life on the Mississippi (Twain) autobiography, 1–2, 4–5, 13 Lincoln, Abraham, 6 Louisiana Purchase, 8 Mark Twain Tonight (program), 6–7 Marquette, Jacques, 9 Mississippi River in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 67 in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 34, 55–56, 65 steamboats on, 9 and Twain, 1, 4–5 Missouri history of, 8–11, 55 Narrative techniques of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 4 above the action, 22–26 author, 14–15, 17–22, 24–25, 34, 36–38, 40, 45–49, 61, 67 control, 16–19, 22 objective view of, 19–22 omniscient narrator, 12–14, 16, 19, 47, 69 third person, 14 tone of, 12 Native Americans depiction in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 11 in Missouri, 9–11 Plot of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 21, 27

adventure in, 4, 13, 19, 28, 32 devices, 43–44 mapping of, 38–41 resolution, 37, 41 Tom’s response to events, 29–36, 44, 59 Aunt Polly in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 16 characteristics of, 36–37, 43–49, 64 wrath and punishments of, 17–18, 30, 32–33 Renault, Philippe Francois, 9 Roughing It (Twain), 7–8 Sawyer, Tom in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 2, 14, 22, 43 adventures, 25, 28, 31–32, 34–41, 44, 47–48, 50, 53, 55–57, 59, 63–64, 68 and authority, 24 community values of, 45, 50–53, 59, 63 good-heartedness, 48–50 compared to Huck, 50–53 imagination, 28, 59, 63 punishments, 20–21, 28–33 response to situations, 29–36, 44, 59 at the trial, 26, 39 as trickster, 4, 13, 16–18, 34, 37, 45, 50 Setting of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 5, 11, 20 cave, 19, 22, 25–26, 38, 41, 56 courtroom, 26, 39, 56–57 funeral, 25, 36, 47–48 graveyard, 22, 31, 38–39, 56 landscape, 54–57, 64–65 Stowe, Harriet Beecher Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 11 Symbolism in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer florid prose, 64 landscape, 64–65 storm and nature, 61–63, 65 Thatcher, Becky in The Adventures of

80 Tom Sawyer, 43 model for, 2 and Tom, 25, 28–34, 37–41, 45, 47, 56 Themes of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer adventures, 25, 28, 31–32, 34–41, 44, 47–48, 50, 53, 55–59, 63, 68 community acceptance, 50–53 conflict between nature and restraint, 59–61, 63–65 Tom Sawyer Abroad (Twain), 69–70 Tom Sawyer, Detective (Twain), 69–70 Twain, Mark adventure, 3–5, 19, 25 biography, 1–8

INDEX birth, 1 death, 8 humor of, 2, 6–7 newspaperman, 5–6, 8 practical jokes, 3 public speaking, 6–8 steamboat captain, 5 truthfulness, 13 unwise businessman, 8 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 11 United States history of, 8–11, 15, 54–55 Ward, Artemus, 6–7 War of 1812, 9

PICTURE CREDITS page:

A: B: C:

D: E:

© Bettmann/CORBIS James Smalley/Indexstock Courtesy of theLibrary of Congress, LC-USZC44294 Associated Press, AP © CORBIS

Cover: © Bettman/CORBIS

F: © Bettmann/CORBIS G-1: © James Smalley/Index Stock Imagery G-2: © Minnesota Historical Society/CORBIS H: © John Springer Collection/CORBIS

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR NEIL HEIMS is a freelance writer, editor, and researcher. He has a Ph.D. in English from the City University of New York. He has written on a number of authors including Albert Camus, Arthur Miller, John Milton, and J.R.R. Tolkien.

■ Mark

Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910). A popular writer and humorist, Twain published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876.

A

■ Sam

Clemens (Mark Twain) lived in this house in Hannibal, Missouri, as a boy. Many of his childhood experiences became the basis for characters and events in Tom Sawyer.

B

■ Mark

Twain was famous not just as a writer but also as a public speaker. He toured the world many times giving humorous talks to packed houses.

C

■ In

his later years, Twain lived abroad for long periods of time. Here, Twain is with his wife, Olivia (seated), and daughter Clara outside their London home.

D

■ In

this illustration of Tom Sawyer, we see the mischievous side of his character, probably playing hooky from school.

E

■ In

Chapter 2, Tom Sawyer dupes his friends into whitewashing Aunt Polly’s fence for him.

F

■ The

landscape of Tom Sawyer is an American frontier town on the banks of the Mississippi River in the 1830s, a place of adventure where wilderness and civilization come together. ■ The

popularity of Tom Sawyer continues long after the book’s publication, in Twain’s sequels, movies, and plays. Here, Jackie Coogan plays Tom in the 1930 film.

G

■ Huckleberry

Finn was the outcast of the village but envied by the other boys because he was free to do as he pleased. This statue of Tom and Huck is in Hannibal, Missouri.

H