Tom Sawyer Abroad (Watermill Classic)

by Mark Twain Author

(From Amazon): Huck is once again our naïve and unreliable narrator, and the increasingly grotesque presentation of Jim's character corresponds to the increasing distance that the young narrator puts between himself and the freedman. In the earlier novel, Twain explored the possibilities of an alliance between the slave and the poor white boy; in Tom Sawyer Abroad, the author exposes the complete breakdown of that alliance, using the degeneration of the blackface minstrel tradition as a trope for his social critique-an unequivocal condemnation of late nineteenth-century American race and class relations. Ambiguity and identification gave way to an increasingly derogatory and relentless stereotyping, culminating in the "coon age" stereotype that we find so familiar today-and Huck's presentation of Jim's character in Tom Sawyer Abroad undergoes the same sort of "degeneration" that Twain saw in the minstrel shows. As the young white boy identifies more and more with Tom Sawyer and the relative respectability and safety Tom represents, the more his characterization of Jim reifies into a horrific and grotesque stereotype, a mask rather than a human being. A series of dialogues or debates lead up to the climactic scenes, in which Tom tries to educate his companions, sometimes with genuine knowledge, sometimes with fanciful flights of imagination or improvisation, but together Huck and Jim actively and successfully question and subvert most of his efforts. As blackface performance changed, working to appeal to more middle-class audiences, such jokes (that allowed the audience its superiority) became more common, and the blackface mask allowed white performers to defer the audience's contemptuous laughter onto a figure more despised than the players themselves: the racial other. Twain allows his white protagonists no such protection here, and the exposure of all three is relentlessly painful.