Humans are the ultimate architects. Along the path of progress, they have bent wood, iron, steel, creeks, streams, rivers, even the truth to their own ends. To dull the edge of a reality too painful to confront, people invent ingenious methods to circumvent it. Such escapist diversions as reading a novel, watching TV, or daydreaming are essential to maintaining psychological equilibrium. But the inevitable question arises: when do ethical considerations, if ever, take precedence over mental self-preservation? According to Mark Twain, always. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he depicts a society corrupted by the subconscious motto of its denizens, “lie, cheat, and steal”. To excuse the immoral behavior, they construct an intricate system of civilized pretenses perpetuated through mainstream culture. Huck Finn stands as a scathing criticism of the debilitating pretensions enforced upon a society’s members.

In Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer is one character who reflects the disturbing impact of popular culture in his obsession with doing “things regular,” i.e., according to the conventions of romantic adventure novels flooding America from Europe at the time. He challenges one boy, “Don’t you reckon that the people that made the books knows what’s the correct thing to do?” (12). His peers defer to his creative imagination and swashbuckling imitation of adulthood. They applaud him for writing “a real beautiful oath” (10) and elect him “first captain ... of the Gang” (13). In the eyes of Huck Finn, Tom is “respectable, and well brung up; and had a character to lose ... and he was bright ... and knowing ... and not mean, but kind” (272). Through the characterization of Tom Sawyer, Twain mocks society’s worship of outmoded conventions.

But despite his wide-ranging—yet pockmarked—knowledge of popular literature, Tom drags Jim through an excessive boatload of trouble merely to satisfy his own thirst for adventure. He explains, “there’s more honor in getting him out through a lot of difficulties and dangers, where there warn’t one furnished to you ... you had to contrive them all out of your own head” (277). To him, the black man is not a human, but simply an object in his external environment. Nor is Aunt Sally, for that matter, or Uncle Silas, or even his best friend Huckleberry Finn. His aunt waits restlessly for “Sid” to return, “setting there by her candle in the window with her eyes towards the road and the tears in them” (327). Tom terrorizes practically the whole Phelps neighborhood with his anonymous letter warning against “a desperate gang of cutthroats” (312). To Huck, he is insistently derogatory, calling him “numbskull” (17), “perfect saphead” (18), “infant-schooliest ... old-maidy” (278), and “ignorant” (280). In contrast to the considerate Huck and Jim, Tom Sawyer comes off as egotistical and insensitive.