It is hard to not bring a great deal of baggage when reading
Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. There are all
the iconic images to deal with: the fence painting, the cave, the runaways to
Jackson Island. Like T.S. Eliot said about
the Hamlet, there is the play Hamlet, and Hamlet, the character, the idea, the
substance. This Hamlet, just like this
Tom Sawyer, lives quite beyond the pages of this book.
So, the reader coming back to this novel as an adult must do
some work. We must keep the two Tom
Sawyers separate in our minds.
Otherwise, the Eliot Tom Sawyer can swamp one of the pillars of
nineteenth century American fiction. Then we are no longer reading a book, but an
ideal.
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