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FIRST ACT Tom Sawyer: An Essay on Romantic Folly [MRS. JUDGE THATCHER]: Now I know you'll tell me. The names of the first two disciples were-- [TOM]: DAVID AND GOLIATH! [NARRATOR]: Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of the scene. -End of Chapter 41 A reader I know has not always appreciated the way the chapter ends. He remembers reading it first as a child, no doubt envious of Tom Sawyer's triumph, yet irked by the thought that had he behaved so there would have been no curtain of charity. lightning bolts from Heaven--or a cloakroom paddling-no longer seemed called for when, as a salaried student ofliterary texts, my reader returned to the passage after some years. Now it was the art of the ending which troubled him. Why not conclude with the capitalized punch line? This turning of a climax into a stage direction seemed all too typical of the many other occasions in the Adventures of Tom Sawyer where a chatty narrator spoils shOwing with telling. The mannerism was at least faintly reminiscent of one of the literary offenses of Fenimore Cooper. With the lapse of more time, though, my reader professes himself satisfied. He thinks he understands who drops the curtain, and why; and he is aware that unless this happens on the very last page, the curtains that fall in narrative must presently rise again. He finds in the total "action (the fall and rise) the key to a theme in which Mark Twain, a committed writer of realism, uses the aesthetics of literary romanticism in order to develop a romantic tall tale and a romanticized tall-tale hero-matters of which the writer could not possibly approve . As for its art, therefore, the end of the chapter now strikes him as both highly deliberate and fairly bristling with the possibilities for a fine paradox. If 124 Tom Sawyer the curtain falls to shut out and hence protect, it also envelopes as it descends, and so from the standpoint of strict realism it must have the counter effect of walling in and entrapping. I o Lady! We receive but what we give And in our life alone does Nature live: Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud! -Coleridge, "Dejection: An Ode" Seeking to cure warts in Chapter 9, Tom and Huck go to the cemetery, where they find instead some very real blemishes on the good order of village society. One by one these uglinesses accumulate, as if in a carefully choreographed procession . There is young Dr. Robinson, nighttime criminal who, by day, goes about masked as a respected authority figure. There is lnjun]oe, a villain, but one whose villainies are underlain and in some measure extenuated by the color prejudices of a slaveholding community. There is Muff Potter, his need for constant oblivion itself a wry commentary on the quality of life in St. Petersburg . And crouched in the bushes all the while are the two small boys who observe this spectacle and the bloody murder in which it culminates. Clearly the scene resonates with potential seriousness. One thinks of Young Goodman Brown's disillusioning visit to the dark forest, or of Wellingborough Redburn discovering a mother and her starving children in the midst of what a moment before had seemed serene Liverpool. And one sees readily enough why Mark Twain requires the scene. During the long Friday-to-Monday weekend set forth in the eight preceding chapters, St. Petersburg had turned entirely too much into a "tranquil world" where, without a cloud anywhere, the "sun beamed down like a benediction." CATS, 46, 57.) A darker, more nocturnal side to village life is needed if the narrative is not to succumb to early blandness and become mere child's play for an audience of children. But having deepened his material and quickened the tempo, Mark Twain has no intention of letting the seriousness get out of hand. A part of the reader's enjoyment for the next several pages lies in watching him work very hard both to have his horror, yet to keep in abeyance any really sinister implications. His strategy consists of a series of beautifully timed risings and fallings of a curtain. First, at just the point of the murder and while the moon is hidden by clouds, the boys are taken out of the scene. Down the hill they run, genuinely and properly terrified, yet never so fearful that they are...

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