Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

1984

Thesis Director

E. Victor Bobb

Abstract

Twain's career as a novelist began with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Before that time he wrote pieces for newspapers and magazines and short stories. The success of Tom Sawyer inspired Twain to write further novels. The Adventures of Huckelberry Finn took seven years to compose, During that time, Twain was forced to face several pitfalls that often confront a writer. One of those pitfalls was a concept he called "training."

The training of an individual in effect is the raising of that individual--the instillation of values and beliefs in a person as he is raised. The process applies to characters as well as the lives we lead. It was the training of his characters that caused him to exert much of his creative energy over the remaining twenty-five years of his life. Huck's training was the first he encountered. As a product of his time and place, Huck, if he was to appear realistic, would have to see Jim as something to be owned. The environment that raised him had trained him to think of Jim as a nigger. If Twain had failed to let Huck face this moral issue, he would have ignored, to some degree, the need to keep his novel realistic. If Huck had no quarrels with his conscience about freeing Jim, his readers would wonder why a boy raised in Missouri in the 1840's would not have any problems with helping a nigger to escape. The quality of the novel would suffer for it.

In the major novels following Huck Finn, training surfaces time and again causing Twain to look harder at training in his novels. The training of a character would interfer with Twain's intentions. Huck Finn was intended to be a boy's story. When Huck wrestled with his conscience over helping Jim to escape, the boy's story evaporated. The remaining residue may appear to be a boy's story on the surface, but its central issue is a far cry from mere adventures. The training of the characters in A Yankee in King Arthur's Court also twisted Twain's original intention into a novel he had no intention of writing. Twain became frustrated. Training interfered in a process which he thought he had ultimate control. The frustration grew, and as a result, Twain allowed the endings of his novels to grow in destructive intensity. In Huck Finn Twain merely reduced Jim back down to a nigger--in effect, destroying him. The destruction of Yankee was considerably greater. The battle of the Sand Belt is perhaps the most memorable ending of any Twain novel. Twain, through his protagonist, destroyed every knight in sixth century England. Pudd'nhead Wilson served as a check stop. Twain, rather than fight against training, used it, demonstrating that he understood how training worked. Although the destruction is not as implicit, the novel still ends with one boy being sold down the river and the other forced to live a life that he is not trained for. In his final novel, Twain used training to achieve his ends. He intended to untrain his protagonist even at the cost of that character. He understood that training was everything and regardless set out to defeat training despite the fact that he would have to destroy his character, too. The destruction went even farther than that. Twain went as far as to destroy everything. He wanted to be done with the whole world after seeing the ultimate futility of living under the influence of training.

My thesis examines each of the novels mentioned above, concentrating on the role of setting and point of view as they helped to determine Twain's exposure to the training of each of his characters. It further explores the result of Twain's frustration as it grew over the course of his career.

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