Writing the Imperial Question at Home: Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians Revisited

Abstract

Mark Indians, for Twain's Injun follows story country Huck, fragment, and Tom, go Huck and for Finn adventures Jim and as they Tom (Twain, head Sawyer west Among Among cut Indians, follows Huck, Tom, and Jim as they head west cut for Injun country and go for adventures (Twain, Among Indians 34). Twain scholars believe that Twain intended story to fulfill conclusion of Huckleberry Finn , sending Huck and Tom to venture into Territory. Likely in 1884, story never became a finished sequel, ending abruptly in chapter nine. Critics are quick to point out overall problematic nature of narrative, proposing that story remained unfinished because Twain recognized its flaws. For example, Walter Blair, in Mark Twain's Hannibal Huck and Tom , argues that, in addition to having to address implied rape of a white woman by Indians, problems of weak characterization, plotting, [and] thematic development ... Mark Twain may well have concluded that completion of narrative was impossible (91). Similarly, other critics, like Albert Stone, suggest that by time he worked on fragment, the major phase of Twain's life as a writer was already past, as he lacked imaginative intensity and was busy with daily affairs (160, 162-63). However, extent of novel's failures, both in general and as primary cause for manuscript remaining incomplete, is contested. Editors Dahlia Armon and Walter Blair argue story was written . . . when its author was at height of his creative powers it is a vivid adventure incorporating many of classic elements of Western novel (xiv). Furthermore, to leave a story unfinished was part of Twain's writing process, as he left behind a number of fragments. Armon and Blair assert, The unfinished state of [these] . . . stories is in part result of Mark Twain's characteristic method of composition (xiv). Twain accounted for these unfinished works by suggesting that stories simply write themselves or do not: As long as a book would write itself I was a faithful and interested amanuensis and my industry did not flag; but minute that book tried to shift to my head labor of contriving