Romance v. Realism
...have to come when he rubbed it, wether you wanted to or not.’ ‘What, and I as high as a tree and as big as a church? All right then I would come; but I lay I’d make that man climb the highest tree there was in the country.’ Shucks, it ain’t no use to talk to you, Huck Finn. You don’t seem to know anything, somehow- perfect saphead. (Twain 18) Twain uses the two extreme examples of romance and realism in Tom and Huck to point out the flaws in them. He challenges the validity of either one by showing how they both miss the point. An example is how neither Huck nor Tom realizes what the other is trying to say. They are both in there own realities. When Tom explains a romantic idea to Huck, Huck tries to apply it to his reality and misses the point of the fantasy. When Huck explains the realistic view of something Tom dismisses it as stupidity because it is not in the books he reads. Instead of coming to an under standing of what the other is thinking and what is going on around them they remain firmly entrenched in there own little worlds. The best example of how a combination of the two ways of thinking can successful together is when Huck fakes his own death. Huck instead of trying to be the unimaginative realist that he usually is used his imagination to come up with a very complicated plan to fake his own death worked without a flaw. Still, he thought “I did wish Tom Sawyer was there, I knowed he would take an interest in this kind of business, and through in the fancy touches (twain 39)”Huck tried to be like Tom by coming up with a fancy plan but he did in his own practical way which ended up working perfectly. Still Huck believes that tom could have added, “Fancy touches” to make it better. It is clear to the reader however that Tom could not have done better and that Huck’s use of both Practicality and ingenuity was a great success. Proving the most successful plans are not bound by realism or lost in romance but in a based in a healthy middle ground. Later Jim reinforces the idea “then I told him the whole thing, and he said it was smart. He said Tom Sawyer couldn’t get up no better plan then what I had. (Twain 51)” Mark twain is trying to show how romance and realism on their own are not a good way of looking at the world. If you look at the world only through romantic eyes as in the case of Tom Sawyer, miss the most obvious of things in life. For example the fact that the best way to free Jim is not to devise a plan to g...