Mark Twain vs Tom Sawyer

I love Twain and view UC/Berkeley's Mark Twain Project to print everything. ever written by Sam Clemens (even down to the individual drafts) as God's own work. Yet, like many readers (including Ernest Hemingway), I've always had a problem with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn's final chapters—say, around the time Tom Sawyer highjacks the novel.

The moral center of the novel, of course, is Huck's decision that sacrificing his friend Jim's freedom to ensure his own eternal salvation isn't a choice he can make. "All right then, I'll GO to hell" may be one of the most powerful lines in all of literature.

So when Sawyer arrives and treats Jim's imprisonment as a further episode of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the novel seems to get all soft in the center. In this essay, Nick Gillespie opines that far from ruining his greatest novel with Sawyer's fatuous nonsense, Twain "reveals in ugly detail the limitations of [the archetypal prankish American] adolescent mentality when confronting the reality of American race relations."

I reread Huckleberry Finn again this past summer; due to Gillespie, I may have to do it all over again, for which I can only say, "thanks."

COMMENTS
Al Marcy's picture

Uh, Clem, loved literaturists. His young lady who composed obits was it :)

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