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Re-reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

One of the main themes underlying American novels, especially the 19th century American novels, concerns the utopian vision, the vision for a better world. The Founding Fathers, having left the Old World with their vision of building a new city on a virgin land, had to eradicate the Native Americans and the Black slaves in the process of fulfilling their vision. They marginalized them as the Others. The writers and novelists, in turn, have attempted to create their utopian vision by restoring them back to life through the literary space. Mark Twain’s utopian vision is well depicted in his two novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Twain criticizes and ridicules the racially discriminating small town, and in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, envisions an alternative order by indicting the slavery culture. In this essay, as a way of emphasizing the revolutionary and liberating vision latent in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I aim to explore the controlling and hypocritical world of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.