Tom Sawyer Dialectical Journal

Before getting to particulars, let me make a few general remarks. One of the first curiosities to note is that the Huck Finn of Tom Sawyer is not the same boy in the book that bears his name. In Tom Sawyer, we are told that Huck cusses like a sailor and is described as “conscience free.” Huck’s excessive use of the N-word may give the sense of a certain coarseness of language in the boy, but otherwise I have difficulty imagining him cussing at all, though he has plenty of reasons for blowing off steam. As for him being “conscience free,” well, his agonizing over Jim in Chapter 31 alone argues for a rather different conception of his character. Though many claims have been made about Huckleberry Finn being at least a candidate for the Great American Novel, whatever that phrase might mean, one should also remember that Twain doesn’t call the book a novel; in fact in threatening ways he points out that this book has neither motive, nor moral, nor plot and refers to it …show more content…
Cather added that it seemed to her that a novel “is merely a work of imagination in which a writer tries to present the experiences and emotions of a group of people by the light of his own.”2 In that sense we might safely say Huckleberry Finn is a novel. Finally, Twain began Huckleberry Finn in idle amusement in the summer of 1876; it was experimental because the author could afford to indulge himself, and this helps to explain vacillations in tone and the freewheeling mixture of burlesque, satire, tall tale, and many other improvisations of technique and purpose. Over the extended period of composition, Twain’s political, social, and philosophical attitudes changed as did his attitude toward Huck’s narrative. Nearly seven years later, when he recognized that Huckleberry Finn was a commodity to be published by his own publishing company, Twain’s view of his material became more