The Structure of Tom Sawyer

Mark Twain's popular novel Tom Sawyer is loosely based on the childhood of Samuel Clemens in Hannibal, Missouri, Clemens being Twain's real name. The character of Tom Sawyer appears as well in its sequel and Twain's masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn, and in Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective, two of Twain's lesser works. The Tom of Tom Sawyer and the Tom of Huckleberry Finn are similar but are given different treatment, for Tom in the later novel is something of a hindrance to Huck and has become so enamored of European adventure fiction that he cannot behave without a book to guide his actions. In Tom Sawyer, Tom is more the average boy, more intelligent than most, but eager to explore the world and assert his youthful prerogatives at every turn. Tom has a rebellious nature perfectly complemented by the more natural Huck Finn, and he is the instigator of a variety of youthful trouble.

Twain wrote about his novel in several letters. He told William Dean Howells in June 1875 that the book had no plot and was following its own drift and that it might take Tom clear into manhood. He changed his mind, though, and decided not to go beyond boyhood. When he finished, he wrote that the book was not a boy's book at all: "It will only be read by adults. It is only written for adults." By the time the novel was published, he had changed his mind and decided that it was a book for boys and should be sold as such. The appeal of the novel is actually quite broad, and it

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Tom. He is talking more like an adult than like an unsocial child. He has, it appears, gone over to the side of the enemy (Blair 96). The book has an episodic nature that made Twain claim it had no plot, but in fact the structure is much tighter than Twain's view might indicate. Twain always claimed that as long as a book was content to write itself, his interest never flagged. It was when the book tried to get him to think and work that he put it away and forgot about it. This explains why Twain was more comfortable writing short stories than novels, for a lengthy work required careful planning, against which he rebelled. Gerber notes that Tom Sawyer seems to have a very simple structure on its surface, but in fact it is a complex blend of four structural patterns, each one taken from a popular genre of the 1870s. The first is the episodical structure of local color writing, something at which Twain excelled. The pattern is evident in the first five chapters in which the author reports and romanticizes the life of this boy in St. Petersburg. The second is the cause and result pattern found in much juvenile fiction of the time, and in these works the superior behavior of the Good Boy invariably leads to praise and pros

Category: Literature - T