I've been reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for the first time in at least 45 years and I find it enjoyable as before, though full of holes. For example, I remembered, when reading Chapter IX, that in about 1970 I'd puzzled over what Dr Robinson meant to do with the grave-robbed corpse of Hoss Williams, and I'm still puzzled now. I'm coming around to the view that the answer to that question isn't in the book. If you know I'm wrong about that, please use the comments to enlighten me. It's clear that Muff Potter and Injun Joe are only the muscle and that it's the doctor, "so young and promising" according to Muff's post mortem lament, who wants the corpse. He knew what local ruffians could for a small price be enlisted to abet his crime, and it's only natural to wonder about his motive. My working general theory of the case is that it's just one of many instances of authorial carelessness. The episode is required to get the plot rolling--Chapter IX, so arguably past time for that--and, unable to think of what the motive would be, Clemons just didn't trouble himself about it: forged ahead, maybe thinking he'd fill in later, and never did.
Why don't the boys run when they see the "ghosts" in the graveyard? Simplest and best answer, again, is that for plot purposes they have to see the homicide. There is no design, no architecture, and Clemons always moves on soon as his immediate need is met. The boys visit Muff's jail cell in a scene that develops their decency and the pathos of the town drunk's situation, all of which prepares the way for Tom's dramatic trial testimony clearing Muff of the crime and implicating Joe, the narrator's access to Tom's mind and activities conveniently eliding till later his night visit to the defense lawyer so that the reader can partake in the pleasures supplied by a surprise witness. And, the effect achieved, Muff drops out of the narrative: there is no scene in which his gratefulness for having been saved from "swinging" is conveyed, nor even I think another passing mention of him. I'm not really criticizing, just pointing things out. The joy of the book is the language, especially the boys' talk, the easy endless flow of it such an ambient pleasure that you feel like a spoilsport for noticing that the pieces don't all fit. The famous scene in which the fence gets whitewashed is just one of many extras--unnecessary, probably composed before the author had an idea where he was headed, and then too enjoyable to be cut after he got there.
Despite all the signs of lack of care, I harbor a possibly overbookish suspicion that the graveyard murder of the promising young Dr Robinson deliberately evokes tales of Hawthorne in which an auditor, walking at an unusually late hour, by chance sees an upstanding citizen performing dark deeds under the night's cover. With Hawthorne, the significance is theological, and the language always like 3 in the morning. Whereas Clemons's sunlit prose is often at the service of a favorite pastime, that of cheerily skewering the lessons inculcated by all the Sunday schools. It might seem odd that the philosopher Nietzsche was a fan of this American "boys' book," but he was, and the send-up of gravity and theology and the conventional morality of all the respectable townspeople must account for his partiality.
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