Unlike all of these figures, Tom is equally an outsider and an insider. He is the only character in the novel, for example, who consistently negotiates the divide between the worlds of children and adults, and is the only one who speaks to both sides.

At the end of the novel, Tom begins to move more fully toward the adult world, though never quite into it. As we have noted, the compassion he shows toward Becky when the two of them are lost in the cave exhibits a degree of maturity that we had not seen in him before. And his coming into wealth through his and Huck’s discovery of the treasure automatically elevates his social standing. Most telling, perhaps, is the closing scene, in which Tom persuades Huck (through trickery) to return to the home of the widow Douglas and to live under her civilizing influence. Tom’s heart is, in his own words, “close to home” (p. 191).

That Tom is ultimately a conciliating figure has partly to do with the form of the novel. As we have said, before the writing of Tom Sawyer Twain’s most characteristic form had been the sketch, which required neither full and convincing characterizations nor an extended plot. In its informality and highly vernacular qualities, the sketch (with its origins in southwestern humor and the tall tale) offered Twain a large measure of freedom. It encouraged his most unruly impulses and his boldest humor. Beyond the punch line, or the outrageous turn of events, nothing had to be followed up or made coherent. The novel, on the other hand, necessitated the coordination of character and plot, and the coordination of one subplot with another.

Tom Sawyer is flawed in this respect (the five or so subplots relate to one another only imperfectly), and Twain knew that this was true. At one point in the composition of the work, he wrote to Howells, “There is no plot to the thing.”11 But overall this was the fullest narrative that Twain had ever written, and ultimately it does hold together. In relation to his character Tom Sawyer, whose presence gives the novel its coherence, this fullness of narrative meant the obligation to “plot” an actual life and its continuity, and to render some form of convincing development. And while this development, contrary to Twain’s initial plan, ended with Tom still in childhood, that childhood itself demonstrates a certain measure of growth.

In a sketch Tom Sawyer might well have been less respectable than he ultimately turns out to be. His impish, and impious, qualities would, in this other narrative context, have been given free reign. The whole point would have been the way some pivotal action of Tom’s had driven a tall tale to its climax. In the more capacious narrative space of a novel, however, one action is necessarily followed by another, and together they form an aggregate that adds up to something like “character.” In this way, Tom’s “badness” is contained and redeemed by the narrative form itself.

Without the novel’s longer development, Tom’s extraordinary capacity for self-absorption—his “vicious vanity” (p. 112)—might well remain for us his defining characteristic. Aunt Polly is not wrong when she calls attention to Tom’s supreme “selfishness” (p. 116). And, as readers, we are frequently witnesses to his maudlin self- pity. Furthermore, we know what a habitual and self-interested liar he is. Tom lies so steadily and successfully, and in so many different human situations, that his relation to the reader risks destabilization. In the moment, we never quite know whether he is telling the truth or not.

But as the plot unfolds, we are able to sort this matter out (through a series of revelations), and in doing so we learn that, for the most part, Tom’s deceptions have been harmless or even motivated by good intentions; they fall into the category of what Aunt Polly calls the “blessed, blessed lie” (p. 117). Judge Thatcher, after all, declares that Tom’s taking the blame for Becky’s transgression at school is “a noble, a generous, a magnanimous lie” (p. 200). Even so, there is no escaping the fact that Tom often exhibits an instinctive aversion to the truth, and that he takes enormous pleasure in his lies—a function, in part, of his romantic imagination and his gift at wordplay. (His role as a kind of fabulist suggests another area of kinship with his creator Mark Twain.) But, again, the novel itself, in its larger rationalization and ordering of Tom’s actions, creates a benign context for his lies.

Just as the form of the novel can be said to validate Tom’s character, it also validated Mark Twain’s role as a man of letters.