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October 31, 2005
"There's More Honor"
"According to Marx, to avoid the pain of the ending that would logically have developed (presumably, Huck hanged and Jim sold down the river), Twain has Tom Sawyer re-enter the narrative and assume command. Tom, a representative of romanticized Southern society, is responsible for subjugating Huck and subjecting Jim to farcically inhumane treatment. It is an ending, Marx argues, that betrays Huck and Jim and exposes Twain's "glaring lapse of moral imagination" (435)."
I didn't understand why Clemens ended the book this way at first and why it was such a disappointment, but because Tom and Huck butchered things up that they were trying to help, the ending wouldn't have been happy. Clemens seems to have thought at the last minute, "wait that would make all of Huck's wonderful contemporary views for his time be in vain" and decided to just throw in that last chapter. According to Hemingway,the book should've stopped before ch.31. I also agree with Scott's views that Tom "romanticizes" Jim's plight and ends up screwing him over in the end and he is also depicted as a mockery of the southern mind, which I find very interesting. Overall, this criticism is excellent and gave me an idea more of what the book was really about and how to better make my own.
Posted by ErinWaite at October 31, 2005 11:58 AM