Tom Sawyer's prank

"They hain't no right to shut him up," Tom Sawyer begins, and for a moment it seems as if he's going to launch into an impassioned diatribe against slavery to cap off the novel, leading me to wonder how scholars could condemn it as racist.

And then it becomes oh so clear. Instead of a diatribe against slavery, we receive the knowledge that Jim has been free for two months, and the entire rescue was yet another fanciful Tom Sawyer adventure--essentially just a prank. Knowledge is power, but I'd much rather have never acquired that knowledge; I wish I stopped reading around Chapter 30, free to imagine my own ending.

By revealing that Jim was already free, Tom makes it much more difficult to read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a social protest, particularly in regard to slavery. Instead of Tom joining Huck in a noble quest to grant Jim his freedom in recognition of his equal humanity, it's Huck joining Tom (unknowingly, but the fact remains) in pranking the community to fulfill a desire for adventure, using Jim as an object in meeting those ends.

Up to that point, I was firmly in the camp defending The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but the ending requires me to re-evaluate. I'm not sure at this point if Tom's prank ruins or undoes the social commentary throughout the rest of the novel for me, but I can see why it might for some people. While much of the novel builds on the idea that Huck innately recognizes Jim's full humanity and identifies with him and his flight for freedom without conscious consideration, the ending seems to "flip the script" and objectify Jim. Tom doesn't seem to seriously consider Jim as he would another human being, since he risks his health and his very life by acting out his prank. Jim was lucky not to be lynched when he got caught, and Tom either didn't consider that possibility or that risk didn't outweigh the benefit of pulling the prank in his mind. Essentially, either Tom is a deeply disturbed character, or he doesn't take Jim's full humanity seriously.

For now, I'm actually leaning towards the former. Tom is clearly an eccentric sort--he was ecstatic to discover he'd been shot in the calf! Just as he doesn't see anything wrong with suffering that physical trauma, I'm not sure he really recognized what he was putting Jim through by making him sleep with rats, snakes, and spiders, among other things. If Jim were a white man, I think Tom would have asked him to do the same things. Do you agree?

One last consideration: even if we assume the latter instead--that Tom doesn't take Jim's full humanity seriously--does that necessarily detract from other messages we may take from the story? Does Tom's views have to be in line with Huck's for us to appreciate Huck's journey, both physical and spiritual? As I said above, I'm not sure if the ending ruins the novel for me yet. I need to think about it some more, and I plan to compose another blog post with my final take on the debate on the subject of whether the novel should be banned, which will be based largely on whether I decide the ending ruins the rest of the book. In the meantime, what do you think: does the ending ruin, or at least detract from if ruin's too strong of a word, the rest of the novel, or is it an acceptable or even enjoyable ending?