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Essay / Tom Sawyer vs. Huckleberry Finn
In the novel Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain portrays the eponymous protagonist as a clever boy who can easily con people. In contrast, the eponymous hero of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an emotional character who follows his inner sense of morality. Mark Twain reintroduces the character of Tom Sawyer in Huckleberry Finn to act as a foil to Huck and show the importance of thinking with your heart as well as your head. Say no to plagiarism. Get Custom Essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get Original Essay Huck, the protagonist of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is established as an emotional and morality-oriented character. Huck follows his heart, even when it goes against what he has always been taught. Tom Sawyer appears near the end of the novel and embodies the opposite traits. Tom is intelligent and bookish, and his actions are not influenced by morality at all. Obviously, both are meant to serve as a foil. The importance lies in what the juxtaposition of the two is intended to accomplish. Twain juxtaposes Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn to emphasize that thinking with your heart is at least as important as thinking with your head. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn follows the story of Huck as he travels down the Mississippi River. From the beginning, Huck is driven primarily by emotion. In the very first chapter, Huck mentions that the Widow Douglas took him in and tried to “civilize” him (Twain 32). The misspelling on Huck's part indicated that he rejected civilization and the formal education that came with it. The action of the story begins when Huck decides to run away from his abusive father based on a primal desire to escape danger, but without thinking about the best way to do so (Twain 58). Huck's emotional character does not care about the danger of going down the river and simply does what he feels is best. Huck also follows his instincts when it comes to morality. Huck makes decisions based on what he believes is right, even when society's rules don't agree, best demonstrated when he decides to help Jim. The most important issue in the novel is the perceived morality of slavery. Huck's black friend Jim is an escaped slave and, by law, should be captured and returned. Huck's decision is whether he should follow what society and the law say, or follow his own feeling that slavery is inherently wrong. At this point, Jim has been captured and will be sold imminently unless someone can save him (Twain 202). Since Huck is Jim's only real friend, that someone must be Huck. The facts laid out before Huck say he should leave Jim where he is; the law says that a runaway slave must be captured and imprisoned, and it is not a good thing to help him. More importantly, Christianity, as it was taught in the slave regions, would prohibit freeing Jim in this situation, and the religion would be commonly identified as synonymous with what is morally correct. In one of the most powerful scenes in the book, Huck wonders if God is going to send him to hell for helping a black man. Huck decides that, if that's true, then "Fine, I'll go to hell!" (Douain 202). This passage is particularly important because it proves that Huck's feelings and his sense of morality are closely linked. A sense of morality might arise from what society considers right, but Huck only cares about Jim being his friend. Huck's sense of right and wrong comes from how he feels. Huck's belief in doing what is right is demonstrated when he works directly to solve Jim's problem. Jim was captured as a runaway slave and is currently being held captivein a shed as a prisoner until he can be returned to his owner. Huck's plan to save Jim involves no thoughts of adventure, pleasure, or personal glory (Twain 217). The only priority is to get Jim out of danger, thus proving Huck's sincere and altruistic intentions. It is obvious to the reader that the plan would have worked perfectly. So, following the emotional character plan would have led to a happy ending for those involved. Then Tom Sawyer appears and comes up with a different plan. By following Tom's plan, life is worse for everyone involved than if they had listened to Huck's simple plan. When Tom Sawyer appears in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he is already a household name. Huck mentioned him several times throughout the book but, more importantly, the audience would have known him from the previous book, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In it, Tom proves both his intelligence and his unscrupulous nature, including convincing people to paint a fence for him. So when he appears in this book, audiences will expect his actions to include various tricks. Judith Fetterly argues that “the desire for fame, the desire to be recognized as exceedingly intelligent, is nothing new to Tom” (Fetterly 72). His brains and the desire for people to appreciate his intelligence are Tom's main motivating force. It is important to note that Tom's intelligence comes at least in part from books. When his plans are questioned, he responds "Why, have you never read any books at all?" (Douain 222). Here, Tom aligns himself with society's bookish intelligence, rather than natural cunning. In addition to being a character, Tom can be seen as a symbol of intelligence and rational thinking. When Tom arrives in the story, he immediately begins to act like a schemer. His most important plot is to help Jim escape. Even though Huck's original plan would have succeeded, Tom is too obsessed with style and glory to care about freeing Jim (Twain 218). At every step of the plan, Tom makes life harder for everyone, only because that's what his books made him think was the right way to do things. For example, Tom decides that Jim must be taken out of the shed with knives (226), write a diary, despite being illiterate (224), and tame dangerous wild animals (240). Tom gets a lot of his ideas from stories, like when, about writing a message in Jim's own blood, he says "The Iron Mask has always done that, and this is a good way too to blame" (224). None of these things will help Jim achieve his goal of freedom. Actually, Jim doesn't really like dealing with snakes and spiders, but Tom ignores him. Tom is so distracted by what books tell him about the right way to do things that he ignores Jim's human needs, showing how his intelligence gives rise to a complete lack of emotional intelligence. Tom's lack of morality is particularly evident in the way he views himself. Tom is so obsessed with fame and adventure that he has his own twisted morals to rigidly follow. When the decision is made to take Jim out of the shed with picks, because the knives are taking too long, he remarks that "it's not right, and it's not moral... but there's no only one way” (Twain 228). Given the end goal of freeing Jim, using pickaxes is the right thing to do, as it will be quicker and more likely to succeed; However, Tom has such strong delusions of grandeur that he values a difficult escape more than actually helping someone. His book learning left Tom with a twisted and unreasonable sense of morality thatis on a completely different axis from what would normally be considered moral. Although Tom is definitely wrong, he is not an immoral character. Even when his actions make Jim uncomfortable, there is no sadism in Tom. James Cox argues that Tom does what he does purely for the thrill of it (Cox 310). Tom's book learning did not lead him to be evil; rather, it led him to lose interest in morality. Even though he ignores the fact that he is harming Jim's chances of freedom, Tom still tries to free Jim. Tom's intelligence leads him to be amoral and not immoral. Twain believed that learning in school was not the same as education, and perhaps even that school could get in the way of a real education. He once wrote: “I never let my schooling interfere with my education” (QuoteDB). The problem with formal schooling is most evident in the character Tom, who gets all his ideas from books and thus represents the artificial learning of society. Another time Twain spoke about intelligence was when he said, “The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority over other creatures; but the fact that he can do evil proves his moral inferiority to any creature who cannot” (CitationDB). Twain cares that humans know right from wrong and believes that humans' thinking can prevent them from doing what is right. The quote is particularly interesting when applied to Huck. When Huck decides to free his friend, he actively chooses to do something he has always been taught to be wrong, despite what intelligent society might say to the contrary. Some critics have argued that Tom's appearance at the end of the novel undermines the book's message. Critic Leo Marx noted that "the ending of Huckleberry Finn worries many readers because they rightly feel that it jeopardizes the meaning of the entire novel." " (Marx 292). He believes that Tom's amoral character goes directly against the point made by Huck. Marx's belief is mistaken. Rather than undermining Huck's importance in the story, Tom emphasizes it in fact, as Janeczko and Matthews mention in their essay on the literary significance of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, “Mark Twain brought Tom back at the end of the novel to serve as a foil for Huck [readers] saw the growth and growth; Huck's sensitivity to human beings, including Jim, in contrast to Tom's romantic predictability” (Janeczko and Matthews 42), it would not be as obvious to the audience how good and morally good Tom is. clever. Twain highlights these two opposing forces in order to show the importance of Huck's decision-making The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was written after the end of the Civil War, so slavery was. abolished for a fairly long period. When Huck acts to free Jim, the audience knows that Huck made the morally correct decision, even though that is not the case. Huck can easily be considered a morally correct character. The conflict between the social and emotional foundations of morality is present throughout the novel. In chapter 18, Huck finds himself caught in the conflict between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons. Here, the quarrel represents the twisted morality of civilized society. Both families desperately try to kill each other, but even those involved don't really remember why (Twain 144). Families continue the feud only because someone older than them asked them to, as Buck demonstrates when he says, "Oh, yeah, Dad knows [who started the feud], I think" ( Twain 144). THE..