huck vs tom

1. Introduction
The American novel reached one of its highest peaks during the life of writer Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name, Mark Twain. With its late development with a self-established status, the American novel appeared in the late 18th century, one of its first creators being considered, although debated along time, Washington Irving. Before Irving, the American novel didn’t have a voice of itself, but always had a tendency towards borrowing from the European form and style, thus being seen by critics as inferior. Starting off with the Colonial literature, which was built on religious grounds and then evolved to the exploration of socio-political problems, including the conflicts with the native Indians, all representing a means of the struggle to find a sense of nationality, a self consciousness as American individual; continuing with the revolutionary period which brought a shift from the Puritanical ideas to the Enlightenment concepts that implied more diversity, and with the post-independence period which had a historical foundation. When it appeared, the American novel had a unique style consisting of humorous and satirical writing on one hand and romantic and nature-inspired poetry on the other, including Edgar Allen Poe’s romantic grotesque form.
Samuel began his career as a writer producing light, humorous verse, tall tales, satirical jokes and pranks after rising to the role of sub-editor in a printer’s shop. After a short period as a travelling journalist, Sam turned to one of his childhood dreams of becoming a river pilot, but this path was abandoned shortly after, as the Civil War began and he decided to make a living out of mining for silver and gold, not after having enrolled and deserting from the Cause and running in the West. Realizing the impossibility of his goal, he picked up writing again, this time for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, where he chose his pseudonym, Mark Twain, proving his passion for the river culture, as the term belongs to the river pilot slang, meaning safe navigating conditions.
After facing hard criticism on his first book, Innocents Abroad, which comprised of travelling letters, being named that beef-eating, blear-eyed, hollow-headed, slab-sided ignoramus – that pilfering reporter, Mark Twain1, he didn’t give up, although discouraged, and reached a turning point while touring in Europe with the publication of the book The Gilded Age, written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner in 1873. With this book, which was his first extended work of fiction, Twain affirmed himself as an author rather than a journalist in the literary world. Finally, by the age of 50 his fame was at an all time high after having written The Adventures of Tom Sawyer(1876), followed by its sequel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(1885). Honoured by the Universities of Yale, Missouri and Oxford, Twain was a distinguished member of the literary world and the father of the Great American Novel.
Mark Twain improved the American novel marking a new era in literature. His origins, the Mississippi area, have a strong influence in his writing as he accurately reflects the common rhetoric of his people. Using this vernacular speech, known in literature as colloquial speech, Twain brought in the American culture and gave it a voice allowing his readers to connect to the stories. Being called by fellow writer and literary critic William Dean Howells sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature, in a speech following Twain’s funeral, the author had a way with words that helped him build palpable characters and relatable, tangible situations.
Working on multiple fronts, besides language, Twain founded the movement into Realism. Abandoning the safety of the Romanticism with its soft, fragile beauty, he leaped into writing about the harsh realities of the American citizen, as we may observe it all through The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.
He added to his novels features of the picaresque, the picaresque novel being as defined by the Oxford dictionary of literary terms a humorous novel in which the plot consists of a young knave’s misadventures and escapades narrated in comic or satiric scenes1. Even though simple in style, he used it in order to incorporate in his works the American drive for adventure. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn stands as a proof of the fact that the path itself is the main driving force. The characters start their journey on the river and, even though small interruptions occur from time to time, they return to it unravelling the mysterious themes.
Mark Twain is known to have been a very independent author in terms of his literary work, as Stuart P. Sherman stipulates: In his prose(...) there is an appearance of free improvisation concealing a more or less novel and deliberate art2. He is forever interested in entertaining his public rather than respecting the literary laws, which he disregarded as neglegible and out of place in a democratic aesthetic1.
Mark Twain was as intriguing an individual as he was a writer. We could, in a way, say he disposed of two personas: the citizen Samuel Langhorne Clemens and the author Mark Twain. We notice this affinity for aliases even in his writings, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn where Huck introduces himself as Sarah Williams, George Peters, Charles William Allbright, Gorge Jaxon, Adolphus and even Tom Sawyer, but somehow we still find the same Huck in all this pretendings as the one who signs in the end your truly Huck Finn2. A representative figure for both American literature and American essence of spirit and culture, whose works can be also considered a monography of the 19th century America, Twain made it easier for us and for the people of his days to understand what the United States has been as a people and community and what the individuals were striving for.
His best two novels are, of course, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which are a fine example of the author’s playfulness, not only because of the language he used or the intricate plots he built, but also because of his ability to intertwine autobiographical elements and traits of the American common folk within his characters’ architecture. The author himself confesses the propinquity between his fictional cast and reality: Huck Finn is drawn from real 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 architecture3.
Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are two names that despite the differences between the characters represented require one another and are the archetypical figures of the inhabitants of the Mississippi river by the eighteenth century. As we will discuss in the following chapters, the most famous couple of the American literature is comprised of two characters that are poles apart from each other considering most of the aspects of life except the fact that they are both orphans. What attracts them to each other is, in fact, just a childish reason like wanting to have what the other has or at least seems to have. Huck admires Tom’s wits and style: I reckoned Tom Sawyer couldn’t a done it no neater himself .Of course he would a throwed more style into it, but I can’t do that very handy, not being brung up to it.1, while Tom envies Huck’s freedom: Tom was like the rest of the respectable boys, in that he envied Huckleberry, his gaudy outcast condition (…)2. An in depth analysis will reveal the differences in their language, in their behaviour, in their vision of the world and their attitude towards it. At the same time, we will try to discover the motivation behind their conduct and the nature of the relationship of the two characters.

2. Historical Context
The whole world was at a turning point in the nineteenth century as some of the old empires were starting to collapse, while new ones were starting to develop. In Europe, the Spanish empire, the Holy Roman Empire and Napoleon’s French empire were coming to an end, whereas the British Empire and the Russian empire were only growing stronger. Besides the merge of the Kingdom of Great Britain with the Kingdom of Ireland into the United Kingdom, the British people became one of the world’s leading powers by expanding its territories to Canada, Australia and South Africa and by populating India. The Russian empire expanded in central and far eastern Asia. In the West, America entered in a phase of extremely rapid changes as by the end of the eighteenth century it gained its independence in 1776. The next century brought the United States in a state of civil war, being considered one of the country’s greatest conflicts.
By the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the United States went through an Industrial Revolution, which affected the entire society. The Blackstone River and its tributaries, which cover more than 45 miles (72 km) from Worcester, Massachusetts to Providence, Rhode Island, was the birthplace of America's Industrial Revolution. The invention of the cotton gin revolutionized the Southern agriculture and the invention of the steam engine provided a means of transportation with a much bigger capacity than before. First, they had the idea of a railway to connect New York and Philadelphia with carriages drawn by steam engines1. Then, one of their best ideas was to build the Transcontinental Railroad, which was finished by 1869 and provided the context for the apparition of new civic centres. In addition, the need of a synchronized train schedule - as each city had its own local time - led to the introduction of the standard time by railway managers in 1883.
By the late 1780s, steamboats were invented and facilitated transportation of both people and commodities. Steamboats played a major role in the development of the Mississippi river, which turned into a highway of the South. In the very beginning of his book, Life on the Mississippi, Twain familiarizes us with his perception of the river as a backbone of the nation: But the basin of the Mississippi is the BODY OF THE NATION. All the other parts are but members, important in themselves, yet more important in their relation to this2. The banks of the river were Mark Twain’s cradle, whom throughout his life was fascinated by the steamboats and all their social and psychological implications.
Stephen Railton draws a parallel between Twain and America’s life and makes it seem like their evolution overlaps to a certain extent: In June, 1867, Samuel Clemens was 31 years old, and the United States was 90. After years of uncertainty and struggle, the future was looking bright for both of them3. Since its birth as a nation, America had to struggle to gain its independence. Likewise, Samuel Clemens’ childhood was marked by his father’s death followed by the necessity of him having to quit school and find a job, in order to support his family and help make ends meet. Also, by 1867, Mark Twain was three years old and, in such a short period of time, this alias was famous in two different ways in America. The humorous sketch, Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog (1865), took his name from the pages of New York Saturday’s Press (where it first appeared) into newspapers around the country, due to its popularity amongst the readers. At the same time, he proved his entertaining abilities by managing to excite his audience’s laughter with his speech and scribbling, when he revised his Hawaiian correspondence into a lecture called Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands and toured with it from San Francisco to New York to Saint Louis and to other mining towns.
An important influence on Twain’s writing was the Civil War. The War Between the States (1861-1865) was a conflict between the unionist states of the North and the confederate states of the South, which were fighting over the issue of slavery, as the Union led by Abraham Lincoln opposed the expansion of slavery and, even more so, desired the abolition of it. Even though a southerner by birth, Samuel Clemens is viewed by most of his critics as a citizen of the world: He was a Southerner and a Northerner, a Westerner and a New England Yankee — a tireless wanderer who lived in a thousand places all around the world1, and considering politics, he was against slavery.
In his childhood days, he spent part of his summers at his uncle’s nearby farm, where together with his cousins gathered in the evenings in the cabin of an old slave, whom they called Uncle Dan’l and who thrilled them with ghost stories while initiating them into the spiritual and superstitious beliefs of the slaves. Living around black people at the early age of innocence made its mark on his conscience, as one of his biographers suggests:
Race was always a factor in his consciousness partly because black people and black voices were the norm for him before he understood there were differences. They were the first voices of his youth and the most powerful, the most metaphorical, the most vivid storytelling voices of his childhood. Uncle Dan'l and Aunt Hannah, who was rumored to be a thousand years old and a confidant of Moses, these were towering personalities to him2.
I believe it was only normal for the young Sam to develop an honest feeling of affection for the people who became the designers of his childly fascinations and to be touched by the memory of a dozen men and women chained together, waiting to be shipped down river to the slave market, who in his eyes had the saddest faces I ever saw.
America was becoming a new country in all aspects and so literature had to undergo a dramatic change in furtherance of a fitting creation, a creation that would reflect its own spirit and character. Writers started rejecting the old dogmas inherited from the European foregoers by implementing a more realistic and down to earth style. There was an attack upon the Romantics and the Transcendentalist, whose idyllic and utopian ideology were forsaken by authors who embraced a pragmatic, democratic and experimental style with the main goal of reporting the world with honesty. The matter of the subject was to be drawn from their own experience and focused on the common, the average and the probable realities of their times. They arrived at the conclusion that the manner of building the characters and the settings were more important than the plot itself in reproducing the substance. The need for a better understanding of their new country, in the context of the varied races, of growing population and of learning the way they live and talk demanded the use of specific dialects, of explanatory geographical references and of vivid depictions of regional manners.
Out of this entire struggle, a new movement arose, the local colour literature, in which according to the Oxford Companion to American Literature one finds the dual influence of romanticism and realism, since the author frequently looks away from ordinary life to distant lands, strange customs, or exotic scenes, but retains through minute detail a sense of fidelity and accuracy of description1. The public began to take a liking to this style as it was both a mirror to the days gone by for those who fondly reminisced it and a mirror to present day society for others.
Mark Twain matured into an authority in the midst of the literary turmoil with his, generally acknowledged as his masterpiece novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which he granted the nation’s wish for a new, entertaining, local flavoured literature:
Something new happened in Huck Finn that had never happened in American literature before. It was a book, as many critics have observed, that served as a Declaration of Independence from the genteel English novel tradition. Huckleberry Finn allowed a different kind of writing to happen: a clean, crisp, no-nonsense, earthy vernacular kind of writing that jumped off the printed page with unprecedented immediacy and energy; it was a book that talked1.
Twain finalized the break from the literature of the East, he gave birth to the genuine American novel, being as much influenced by the changes through which his country was going as much as by his own vision and strive for greatness.

3. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Initially called simply Tom Sawyer, the book was started as a play in 1972 and is Twain’s successful attempt to portray the life of a real southern boy whom he intimately knew by memory and by introspection and by those deductions of the imaginative faculty which start from a solid basis of actuality2. We may say that this is the story of his own boyhood and of the boys he lived with, in Hannibal, as the author states in the preface of the novel: 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 mine3. A boy story at heart, coated with a fair amount of social commentary, the novel also represents an epitome of the life in the idle towns down Mississippi river. Although the main character isn’t taken into full manhood, we can still consider the book a bildungsroman, a coming of age story, for its introspective and analytical qualities.
The hero, a one-horse-town boy, belonging to the better sort of people, is to the core a southern boy, whose character accurately describes life in that region, and his roughness, the fact that he was neither a model of flawless youth, nor a wretched example, only adds to his charm by making him more humane, more realistic.
The beginning of the book leaves no place for surprises, as it introduces us to Tom as a little rascal. His aunt Polly is looking for him around the house and finally finds him in the pantry after he’s been stealing jam. Knowing he is about to be kicked he pulls the old look out behind you trick and, to his aunt’s despair, it works, allowing him to get out of the house unharmed, jump over the fence and go play hookey for the rest of the day. He only returns home in time to help Jim, a young slave, chop some wood, although he doesn’t do much of that either, but only talks about his adventures during the day, while his annoying, well-mannered, half-brother Sid, does his chores. Suspecting he’s been ditching school, Aunt Polly interrogates Tom at the dinner table, about his day, but the boy manages to dodge her questions and steal some sugar at the same time. Things are complicated by Sid, who tattles on Tom, but does it too late, so the young knave has time enough to leave the house.
Whistling down the street, he sees a too-well dressed boy coming his way, this being a good enough motive to pick up a fight. They stare each other down and after a verbal altercation about who could lick who and who’s a liar or whose brother can beat up the other’s, they get down to it and start fighting. Tom comes on top of it, but ends up chasing the boy to his home, after the loser hits him with a rock while he had his back turned. Returning home he is caught by his aunt, while trying to climb a window and she plans on making the next day difficult for the boy.
Indeed it would have been a difficult day for Tom, whitewashing the fence, if it weren’t for his cunningness and brilliance. After trying to persuade Jim to do the whitewashing for him in exchange for marbles, which were a rare commodity in St. Petersburg, he came up with the idea of pretending that the job isn’t actually such a burden, but that it is rather the seldom honour of producing art, the idea evolving to the extent that the children, who initially came around to make fun of Tom, who had to work instead of playing with them, were now eager to pay him for the privilege of painting the fence. Not only did Tom avoid doing his chore, but also he increased his wealth – if broken glass, old keys and one-eyed kittens can be considered wealth.
Proudly, he goes to Aunt Polly to inform her that his job is done and after she checks it – for she wasn’t at all convinced that the boy would execute his punishment, let alone finish it so fast – the woman gave him an apple and allowed him to go play. Never satisfied and wanting to keep himself in shape, the mischievous boy also steals a doughnut, and on his way out enjoys his revenge on Sid by throwing dirt clods at him. He goes to the town square, where the children are putting in stage a fight between two armies. Being the most popular boy in town, Sawyer gets to be the captain of one of the armies, while the other one is led by his good friend Joe Harper. After leading their troops in the battle and stirring them, the two retire and sit aside chatting. Tom’s brigade wins and the two leaders settle the date and time of the next encounter.
On his way home, the child passes by the house of a school friend, Jeff Thatcher, where he notices a girl so beautiful that it captures his heart immediately, proving his unsteadiness and his unfaithful character – as he so easily forgets his previous girlfriend, Amy Lawrence, even though he had thought of her as the love of his life and had been through months of pain trying to get her to share his fancy. After only a week since she’s confessed her feelings, here he is, hardly remembering her, just as if she were one of the others and not at all a special person for him anymore:
A certain Amy Lawrence vanished out of his heart and left not even a memory of herself behind. He had thought he loved her to distraction; he had regarded his passion as adoration; and behold it was only a poor little evanescent partiality. He had been months winning her; she had confessed hardly a week ago; he had been the happiest and the proudest boy in the world only seven short days, and here in one instant of time she had gone out of his heart like a casual stranger whose visit is done1.
Tom embarks on a quest to impress the girl the best way he can, which is by showing off and making a fool of himself, doing all sorts of silly acrobatic manoeuvres. The girl seems to be unimpressed at first, but as she enters the house, she throws a flower to him, which he picks up with his toes when she’s not watching. After hanging around her house for the rest of the evening, hoping for a chance to impress her some more, Sawyer goes home for supper so happy that he doesn’t even mind being scolded for having thrown dirt at his half-brother or even being slapped on the wrist for stealing sugar. Anyway, he comments on Sid’s stealing sugar and not getting punished for it and Aunt Polly shuts him down defending Sid and praising his usual good behaviour.
Taking advantage of his immunity, the brother arrogantly reaches for the sugar bowl, but his fingers slip and the bowl breaks to Tom’s content, who’s now keen to finally see his half-brother being licked. To his surprise, assuming he’s to blame for the broken bowl, the aunt, without even investigating the deed, slaps him. Hurt in his feelings and pride more than physical, the clean-handed boy starts crying and tells the truth about the one to blame in this situation. Puzzled and feeling guilty, Aunt Polly tells him the slap was anyway deserved for all the other bad things he did when she wasn’t around.
Although conscious of his aunt’s remorse, he shows no sympathy to her, but only sinks deeper in self pity. We get a glance at his need for compassion and attention here and we could judge it as a psychological damage, produced by the lack of a real family, as the privation of parental authorities are known to affect children. His melancholy aggravates to the point where he can’t stand any joyful interruption, so his Cousin Mary’s happy return home makes him leave the house in search of a place that would suit his mood. He wanders down the river until he remembers the flower from Becky that makes him think about her and ask himself if she cares enough about him as to be sorry if he was to die. He decides to go to her house and wait for his end to come there so she could find his lifeless body and cry over it. His plan doesn’t work out as expected and he ends up soaking wet when a house maid pours a bucket of dirty water out the window, so he leaves cursing after having broken a window.
The next morning introduces a lazy Tom, who isn’t willing to learn his Bible verses – his Sunday School homework – but prefers putting his new treasure, a knife received from Mary, to good use, carving up everything that comes in sight. After failing to teach him his assignment, Mary struggles with the task of getting the boy ready for school, which involves bathing him and convincing him to get into shoes and into his nice Sunday clothes. Again, we are confronted with his rebellious character since he despised these things, considering them constrictions made up to fence in his freedom and will. Rules and common law are his enemies, demonstrating his proclivity towards breaking them and imposing his own code.
Rather than learning by heart verses from the Bible, he makes use of his entrepreneurial talent and exchanges his belongings with tickets, so he can get a prize Bible from the teacher, not that he cared about the Bible, but to impress Becky and her parents, who were visiting the school. He also intends to acquire recognition among his peers and surpass any of them in fame, which was one of his main goals in life: “The looks” and “the remarks” of others, the narrator admits at one point, are “food and drink” to Tom1. He fails again to do so and embarrasses himself when Judge Thatcher, the girl’s father, asks him to demonstrate his knowledge by naming the first two apostles, which, of course, he didn’t know.
After Sunday school, the town folks gather together for the main church service. We discover here that young Tom is a bit self-centred: when the priest says in his sermon that at the end of time, the lion and the lamb will lie down together and a little child will lead them, Tom can’t help but imagine himself as that little child. His imagination is so powerful and convincing that it makes him feel happy at the thought of his future destiny as a leader of the herd. Also a good performer, Sawyer entertains the bored crowd of the church, accidentally setting free a pinch-bug which is barked at and chased by a stray poodle.
The next chapter opens with the boy’s reluctance to go to school and his concoctions to avoid doing it, like pretending to have a mortified toe, which does not convince Polly. Now he truthfully accuses a loose tooth and the aunt decides to quickly pull it out despite Tom’s resistance. Although disappointed by his defeat, Sawyer figures out a bright side of things, using his nasty tooth as a means to show off in front of his colleagues and later on as new trading goods.
One of the main plot lines of the novel begins with Tom’s running into Huckleberry Finn, the juvenile pariah of the village2, the envy of all the boys who dreamt to be like him because of his supposed freedom:
Huckleberry 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.3
The boy was carrying a dead cat in a sack, which, he told Tom, helped cure warts if taken into a graveyard, by the resting place of a fresh buried mean person and chanted upon with the right words: Devil follow corpse, cat follow devil, warts follow cat, I’m done with ye!. The adventurous little fellows decide to go that very night to the graveyard and test out the cure. Back at school, Tom puts in motion a newly designed plan to get to Becky’s heart. Knowing that society dislikes Huck and forbids children to associate with him, and also knowing that the punishment for such a deed included, besides a good beating, him being moved in the girl area of the classroom, when asked for the reason of his being late, he proudly admitted to having spent his time with Huckleberry Finn. This time he got what he was looking for and went straight to Becky’s desk and sat next to her satisfied. Tom starts flirting with the girl and after giving her a peach and capturing her interest, he starts drawing, covering his work with a hand, as to not let her see what he’s doing. She is all intrigued and after promising him she won’t tell, the boy shows her what he drew: a house and a man as big as the house next to it. We find in the book a drawing, most probably made by Mark Twain, that gives us an idea about how Tom’s sketch would have looked like. Despite his roughness and his triviality, Tom exposes his other side, characterized by genteelness, respectability and adaptation to the normality and expectations of the society he lived in, as he draws a man with a top hat - which is a symbol for gentlemen - and a woman holding a fan, again a symbol of civilization.

Drawing by Mark Twain for page 70, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
(Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1875)

The girl is thrilled by his drawing, so Tom offers to teach her to draw after classes. Then, he declares his love for her, scribbling I love you on his slate and although she hits him on the hand, it is clear that she likes him too. By the end of the classes Tom starts chatting with Becky and after coming out at the little end of the horn, speaking about dead rats and the pleasure of swinging them above one’s head, he gets the girl to tell him that she loved him too and also to kiss him, thus demonstrating his ability to persuade others according to his will. When the engagement is done, he cracks the bell again, mentioning his former lover, Amy Lawrence, which causes the girl to cry and Tom not being able to rectify the situation, even after offering her his most valuable thing: a brass andiron that she throws away. Upset by the situation, he fleets the scene and runs into the wood, where he contemplates his faith and wishes to die temporarily, but his loneliness is interrupted by his friend Joe Harper and the joy he brings, so the two youngsters start playing, doing a rehearsed enactment of the battle between Robin Hood and Guy of Guisborne. Midnight comes and Tom meets Huckleberry and together they go to the graveyard. They are in for a surprise as Twain makes them witness a cold blooded murder, committed by that murderin' half-breed Injun Joe,1 who tricks the drunkard of the village, Muff Porter, into believing he’s done the atrocious deed. Deeply affected by the sight of the murder, the children run and hide in a tannery, where they come to the conclusion that they should not speak about what they have seen, being sure that Injun Joe would come after them if they did. In order to make sure they both keep their promise, Tom and Huck make up a contract that stipulates the circumstances, conditions and outcomes, in the case of betrayal, which is sealed with their blood. For the next week Tom Sawyer is torn between two consuming feelings. He is affected by his fear of Injun Joe’s violence and concerned about Muff Porter being judged and punished, even though he is innocent. Facing children with murder is in some critics’ eyes rather tyrannical of Mark Twain, but it also a good way of bringing to light Tom’s nobility. As time passes, the boy realizes there are other things that require attention, like the fact that Becky has not been to school for some time. Thinking that she might have died, he sinks deeper in his depression, worrying Aunt Polly, who not knowing what the boy is suffering from, starts him on a series of medicines, diets and therapies, culminating with the administration of a certain Pain Killer, which in a way cures him, being so unbearable that Tom reaches his limit of acceptance and decides to become his old self. He puts the medicine into a crack in the floor every time he gets a chance to, until one day he gives it to the family cat, Peters, which immediately starts bouncing off the walls. Although she hits Tom with her thimble for his deed, Aunt Polly feels guilty at the thought of having forced the boy to take a medicine that made the cat behave in such way. Back at school, Sawyer finally sees Becky, but she turns out to be mad at him, which causes him to run away again, but this time to never return and start a life of crime as a pirate. This new story line starts with Tom, Joe Harper and Huck’s running away on a raft to Jackson’s Island, deciding to remain dead for the world and away from civilization.
After each one of them assumes a new pirate name, the play begins, but is interrupted by a deep, sullen boom [that] came floating down out of the distance1. The boys realise that the sound comes from a ferry crowded with people searching for the body of someone who has drowned and come to the conclusion that it is them who drowned and the people are looking for. The thought of being the centre of attention makes them ecstatic and joyful.
Joe’s idea of returning home, because of the grief their families could be in, is ridiculed by Tom and Huck. Although Tom laughed at Joe’s suggestion, he felt remorse on the inside; his bravery and carelessness were only a facade. By nightfall, after the other two boys felt asleep, young Sawyer returned to mainland and went home with the thought of leaving his aunt a letter, explaining they weren’t dead but only ran away to become pirates. On his arrival, he found his aunt and Joe’s mother crying and mourning over the memories of the two boys and heard their conversation about the funeral service that was to take place the following Saturday. Tom has mixed feelings confronted with this situation: on one hand, he is feeling guilty and sad for having caused such pain to his aunt and on the other hand, he is excited about being missed; his passion for fame and showmanship, together with his slickness help him produce a plan to return home with the whole gang on the day of their funeral. He gives in to the temptation of the massive shock that his project would induce to the whole community and heads back to the island without leaving the letter for his aunt.
The operation has the expected effect on the church audience; everyone is both shocked and thrilled to see the three boys marching down the aisle, with a heroic attitude, in the middle of the ceremony. Tom is now resurrected and so has attracted upon him both the admiration and envy of all his peers. Having achieved notoriety, which is one of his goals in life, the boy feels comfortable affirming that this was the proudest moment of his life2.
From another perspective though, his love life hasn’t improved at all, since he decided his glory was enough for him and that he doesn’t need Becky anymore. Desperate when finding Tom talking to his old girlfriend Amy, the girl resolves to make him jealous by chatting with Alfred Temple, but gets tired of him fast enough and sends him his way, after Tom leaves the scene. Anyway, Alfred figured it out he was used and avenges himself by pouring ink on Sawyer’s book. A witness to his treachery, Becky makes the decision of not telling the truth about the book and letting Tom take the fall.
The boy returns to school with the intention to make up with the girl and surprises her as she was peeking into the secret book of their teacher, which she found in the unlocked drawer. Scared by the boy’s appearance, she manages to rip one page of the book and blames Sawyer for having startled her. Temperamental as he is, he changes his mind about making up with the girl and comes to the conclusion that she deserves a good beating for the broken page. When the time comes and Becky is about to be licked, Tom’s gentleness prevails and he assumes the blame, even though he has already been beaten for the ink on his school book. Ashamed, Becky confesses everything and applauds his nobility: Tom how COULD you be so noble1.
After a boring and seemingly endless summer, school starts again and the date of Muff Porter’s trial approaches also bringing the old fears and troublesome thoughts of Tom. Him and Huck meet and renew their contract and tormented by their consciousness, they try to help Muff anyway they can, by slipping tobacco and other stuff to his jail cell. They are dropping eves the first day of trial and are concerned by the way it goes along, as the defence attorney does not cross-examine any of the witnesses and it seems clear that Muff will be convicted and executed. The next day, we discover that Tom couldn’t bear his heavy heart anymore and told the attorney everything he knew, as he is called to the witness stand and finally makes it all public about Porter’s innocence and Injun Joe’s brutal murder, making a glittering hero of himself once more.
Tom’s fear of Injun Joe after he fled the court room fades away and his hunger for adventure returns; the idea of searching for a hidden treasure is born, so he hunts down Huckleberry Finn and persuades him to join his quest. Despite his rejection of school, Sawyer has a passion for adventure literature and we can see the influences of what he read upon him, as he knows everything about where they could find a treasure or about how to be a pirate, as seen in the previous chapters.
According to him, treasures are buried by robbers under dead trees, or on deserted islands or hidden in haunted houses. Avidly digging under a tree, the boys talk about what they would do if they found an actual treasure: while Huck is stuck in his no expectations world, only wishing for pie and a glass of soda a day, Tom is full of expectations and shows his hopes of becoming a gentleman and settling down, wishing a red tie and getting married. Not finding any treasures, he presumes they’ve been digging in the wrong place and tries a couple more interpretations of the book text, but to no avail. Tom would rather doubt himself than assume the books are wrong; they represent the main authority for him and are to be obeyed without exception.
Tom’s decision of searching in the old haunted house leads them to their next adventure. While scanning upstairs for signs of a treasure, they hear people heading towards the house and find themselves in the impossibility of leaving it. The people who enter the house turn out to be Injun Joe and some vicious friend of his, who are planning another job. To the boy’s amazement, the half-breed discovers a chest full of gold coins, which he judges to be hidden in his den, at number two, under the cross.
Curiosity, as well as a sense of leverage pushes Tom to follow the two criminals, in order to find out where the money is hid. Tom commissions Huck to watch the tavern where the money was supposed to be hidden every night. In the meantime, he meets Becky again and being so easily distracted, he forgets about the whole business amidst all the fun he is having with her. The euphoria comes to an end when he and the girl get lost in the caves they were visiting. This is Tom’s most important scene of parading his courage, as he is both capable of maintaining his calm, while looking for an exit and also capable of maintaining Becky comfortable and secure. This is his real heroic act, unlike the one with the return from Jackson Island. This situation presented real dangers which he managed to overcome. But this act of saving the heroine and finding a way back to life happened without any witnesses, this time offering him redemption for the charade he put on the last time:
After he and Becky have been lost in the cave for just about the same amount of time as he, Joe and Huck had spent on Jackson’s Island, and the townspeople have once again given up hope, he manages another return from the dead, saving himself and the heroine by finding a way back to the sunlight. This time no makebelieve or manipulation is involved. Indeed, this act of heroism is performed in the dark, where no one else can see it. The real victory parade that St Petersburg spontaneously creates for the saved children is a kind of redemptive antithesis to the sham funeral service earlier1.
While searching for an exit in the cave, Tom almost ran into Injun Joe and discovered that the treasure was actually hidden in the cave. He goes back to the cave with Huck and they dig out the treasure and share it. Back in the village, the widow Douglas holds a party, during which she announces her intention of taking care of Huckleberry Finn and civilizing him, to which Tom’s response is that Huck does not need any civilization as he is rich. For one last time he causes shock among the village people and this time almost everyone follows his example and starts digging for lost treasures. We are faced again, at the end of the book, with a more accommodated to society Tom, who is trying and succeeding to convince Huck to stay with the widow as he can’t seem to be able to make himself comfortable in this new world. He is now conscious that being civilized is the only option. He admits that this is necessary and advices Huck to put it in practice himself: everybody does it that way1.