In Defense of Tom Sawyer

Is John Green missing the point?

Hello everyone.

This is the first literary analysis I’m posting. Here is The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as PDFs — you can download for free to your phone, and to the “Books” app for iPhone. It’s come in handy more than once, especially on the subway.)

There are many more points to be made about the scenes I’ve picked to write about, more than what would occur to me as an undergraduate. My only intention is to address John Green’s claim that The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is ‘uninteresting.’

There are spoilers to both books here.

Hope everyone is OK out there.
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“James Ellsworth Brehm's illustration from a 1917 edition of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer shows the enterprising young lad getting the job done, after a fashion.” (via: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/almanac-tom-sawyer/)

A week ago, I finished reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn after finishing its predecessor, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. They were originally both assigned to me in the 5th grade, but being disinterested in literature at 10 years old, I resisted the assignment as much as possible.

I decided to revisit them after being told (as an English major at 23) that Huckleberry Finn was the American novel and neglecting to read it would handicap my understanding of American Literature.

The novel tells the story of Huckleberry Finn, a miscreant boy who becomes morally on the Mississippi, while simultaneously capturing pre-Civil War American values. He becomes spiritually freed by Jim, a slave he helps carry to emancipation. It deserves its title as a classic.

The narration of the book was unlike anything I’ve ever read. School has largely trained me to deconstruct difficult-to-read texts, whereas Huckleberry Finn is, by design, a relatively easy read beside the southern jargon. 

There were a few scenes in the book that, at first, were symbolically confusing, like Sherburn shooting the drunk and being chased back to his home by a mob, or the circus, where a drunk forces himself into the ring before revealing he’s actually a hired performer (both of these scenes, I’ve read, are commentary on the twisted and confusing principles of American society in the 1830s.) In an effort to better understand the book, I looked for lectures and analysis videos online.

The first I came across was “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Part 1: Crash Course Literature #302,” by John Green, author of several acclaimed young adult novels like The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles all the Way Down, both of which I remember re-stocking frequently as a bookseller in 2019.

In the analysis, Green does a fair job of analyzing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn while including important information about Twain’s life and the circumstances of writing it. While providing context, though, he says:

“I have to say that although I am a huge fan of Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is not a great novel. In fact, it's read today mostly only for two reasons: one, because it's the prequel to Huck Finn, and two, because it's considered somehow less controversial than Huck Finn — which it is, but it is also much less interesting.”

He continues in part 2, when critiquing the ending of Huck Finn:

“And yes, the ending ties up the loose ends of the plot pretty neatly and restores to the book some of the feel of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. But as previously noted, Tom Sawyer isn’t that great of a book, so going back to its tone isn’t necessarily a great call.”

Hearing that, I filled with a sudden appreciation for Tom. I thought everyone agreed it was among the American novels we consider an absolute touchstone — how could it be that he didn’t agree?

I’d heard that Tom Sawyer hadn’t performed as well upon release as Twain anticipated (saying it “shall outsell any previous book of mine”), and I could understand it being overshadowed by Huckleberry Finn, referred to by Hemingway as the novel from which all American literature “comes from.” Huck Finn is also a longer read — by roughly 100 pages, depending on your edition — and by consequence, has more to say.

I acknowledge being partial to Tom Sawyer’s plot: roguish, American boy crosses the threshold into responsibility, morality, and justice. Generally, stories about young adults crashing into adulthood activate my sentimentality. However, these things considered, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is not a “bad” novel as Green describes, and pretty far from uninteresting. The books are only different in their mission and approach.

While Huck Finn is primarily an anti-slavery novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer places Tom’s maturity as it’s nucleus. Twain says in the authors preface:

“Although my book 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 pleasantly to remind adults of what they once were themselves, and how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in.”

Huck Finn only has this intentionally ironic notice at the beginning:

“PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”

At first, Tom is the boy-vagabond whose allegiance to himself exceeds social responsibility. He is a child-pawn to social institutions like school, church, family, and community, and often utilizes his delinquent-intuition to subvert authority and avoid consequence. However, as the novel progresses, so too does Tom’s gauge of accountability — and contrary to Huck, it mostly involves the settings and characters in St. Petersburg.

Some of the most important chapters in the novel involve Tom’s journey to Jackson’s Island (13-17). The island in both novels is an experiment in escapism. 

For Tom, he leaves for the island, downcast by heartbreak and loneliness:

“Tom’s mind was made up now. He was gloomy and desperate. He was a forsaken, friendless boy, he said; nobody loved him: when they found out what they had driven him to, perhaps they would be sorry; he had tried to do right and get along, but they would not let him … Yes, they had forced him to it at last: he would lead a life of crime.”

Distraught, he stumbles into Joe Harper in a similar state of despair:

“His mother had whipped him for drinking some cream which had never tasted and knew nothing about; it was plain that she was tired of him and wished him to go; if they felt that way, there was nothing for him to do but succumb; he hoped she would be happy, and never regret having driven her poor boy out into the unfeeling world to suffer and die.”

Then he runs into Huckleberry, and initiates them into his make-believe pirate gang. They take on increasingly impressive titles: Joe, “Terror of the Sea,” Huck, “The Red-Handed,” and Tom, “The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main.” Together, they flee from St. Petersburg in a raft and make for the island, in the perfect fashion of a childhood daydream.

Before touching down, it felt like a success:

“Now the raft was passing before the distant town [of St. Petersburg] … The Black Avenger stood still with folded arms, ‘looking his last’ upon the scene of his former joys and his later sufferings, and wishing [Becky] could see him now, abroad on the wild sea, facing peril and death with dauntless heart, going to his doom with a grim smile on his face.”

Tom’s strongest characteristics are his boundless creativity, and hyperactive desire for adventure, however here, they are partially veiled in spite. This separates him distinctly from Huck who throughout Adventures of Huckleberry Finn exudes very little resentment or bitterness — despite, to the average person, being completely justified. His father is an aggressive drunk, who upon confessing his jealousy about his son’s education and lifestyle, kidnaps and beats him in a cabin three miles from town. Huck narrowly escapes and begins his journey, not meeting another character until Jim on Jackson’s Island. Despite the appalling conditions, he hardly makes a statement of spite, and actually appears somewhat sorry for his dad’s physical condition in Chapter 5:

“He was most fifty, and he looked it. His hair was long and tangled and greasy, and hung down, and you could see his eyes shining through like he was behind vines. There warn’t no colour in his face, where his face showed; it was white; not like another man’s white, but a white to make a body sick, a white to make a body’s flesh crawl — a tree-toad white, a fish-belly white. As for his clothes — just rags, that was all.”

The same can be said for Huck’s attitude toward the Duke and King, two con men who intrude on Huck and Jim’s mission. Huck appeases their obviously farcical claim to a royal lineage, calling them their preferred titles. Then, when they are finally punished for schemes, he sees them carried away, tar and feathered, and says:

“Well, it made me sick to see it; and I was sorry for them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed like I could never feel any hardness against them any more in the world. It was a dreadful thing to see. Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.”

Despite the cruelty he’s witnessed (and experienced), Huck remains incredibly sympathetic and noble. 

When the boys touch down on the island “far from the haunts of man,” they are steeped in the romance of the situation — saying “they would never return to civilization.” However, the presence of “conscience” invaded their sleep:

“They began to feel a vague fear that they had been doing wrong to run away; and next they thought of the stolen meat, and then the real torture came … So they inwardly resolved that so long as they remained in the business, their pirating should not again be sullied with the crime of stealing. Then conscience granted a truce … “

Stealing, here, is emphasized as an immoral construct of society which attacks the boys at their most introspective. They’ve broken a social code which should be irrelevant to them given their status as both pirates and runaways. Here a foreshadowing occurs — the boys are reminded of their attachment to the “outside” world which they’ve retreated from, and their desecration of its norms. Despite their vagrancy, they feel a compulsion toward doing “right” by their moral compass. This is the first of several reasons the boys eventually return home.

A second reason unfolds: more and more, they silently confront their homesickness until they see a steamboat powering down the Mississippi looking for drowning victims. Upon realizing the boat was looking for them, they sprang with a feeling of heroism and valor at the thought of the notoriety of going missing. While they celebrate having conquered the bindings of society, at the chapter’s end, Tom sets out restlessly for the town after his accomplices have gone to sleep. There, he finds his family mournful of his disappearance, which brings him silently to tears and apologies before leaving unnoticed. Here, Tom witnesses his importance to the health of his town. He realizes suddenly, he’s done a terrible thing to the emotions of his family in escaping, and while watching his aunt sob herself to sleep, he is struck with an idea:

“But something occurred to him, and he lingered considering. His face lighted with a happy solution of his thought; he put the bark hastily in his pocket. Then he bent over and kissed the faded lips, and straightway made his stealthy exit, latching the door behind him.”

His idea, eventually, is to return to the town during the boy’s funeral.

With his associates whining of homesickness and bearing the destruction of a shattering storm, Tom learns that escaping never lasts. It's an unrealistic means of accomplishing anything, and eventually, society will remind you of your necessity. And while these reasons for returning challenge Tom’s conception of escapism and fantasy, they also are components to a larger analogy: Twain’s commentary on romanticism.

While The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is considered the novel more steeped in romanticism of the two, it still provides interesting insight into America’s transition into realism. Tom realizing his inextricable relationship with St. Petersburg is Twain’s commentary on America’s literary future necessarily returning to realism  — a literary movement created by a growing and literate middle class which sought to describe things truthfully and plausibly.

To Twain, the characteristics of romanticism cannot last — “subjectivity and an emphasis on individualism; spontaneity; freedom from rules; solitary life rather than life in society; the beliefs that imagination is superior to reason and devotion to beauty; love of and worship of nature; and fascination with the past” (via Introduction to Romanticism [uh.edu]). These traits are the magnificence of the trip, and are impermanent.

So while Tom learns that escapism never lasts, Huck is the opposite. At his novel’s end,  despite traveling along the idealized Mississippi inflicting suffering on him and Jim, he insists on moving on alone:

“But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before” —

mirroring the book’s beginning, when a reformed Tom urged him to stay with the Widow. Huck choosing to remain nomadic begs the question: is this a sign of maturity in understanding and accepting the risk, or of being a child and not joining society?

In both novels, there are attempts by society to “sivilize” the boys, which mostly ends in abject failure. Both boys are forced into maturity, though by what metric someone is “mature” is the contention of each book. For Tom, it's a growing sense of personal accountability in society, and for Huck, it's a deconstruction of society and finding a moral niche in its absurdity and inconsistency — and, maybe finding the agency to run from it. They both grow tremendously from the beginning of their respective novels, but into different categories. Maybe, as Kenneth Warren says in Black and White Strangers (via https://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/realism.htm), Tom Sawyer is a work more concentrated in realism —  "the redemption of the individual lay within the social world” — while Huck Finn is more sentimental — "the redemption of the social world lay with the individual” (75-76).

This is the intelligence of both novels, and what makes Tom Sawyer just as interesting. Twain attempted something much larger with Huckleberry Finn, but provided just as insightful commentary on two dangerously intelligent boys grappling with the obscurity of the pre-Civil War south.