摘要

《汤姆•索亚历险记》不仅是马克•吐温的最伟大的作品之一，同时也是儿童小说中最受欢迎的作品之一。它受到了一代又一代年轻读者的青睐。通过详细的书面分析，本文的论点是汤姆索亚是以何种方式伴随着孩子的心理成长并赢得了读者们的钦佩。通过对前人研究的简单回顾，本文着手于对马克•吐温笔下人物的分析，进而探索他在《汤姆索亚历险记》中人物塑造的独特技巧。接下来将对他的独特技巧展开分析，例如人物的外貌及心理描写，以及儿童特有的语言描写。从整体上看，马克•吐温不仅被美国文坛所铭记，同时也对世界文坛做出了巨大贡献。论文以《汤姆索亚历险记》的艺术魅力表现在对汤姆•索亚的理想主义、天真无邪、好奇心以及英雄主义的深刻理解，同时又离不开马克•吐温的细致观察和他独特的写作手法作为结尾。

关键词：汤姆•索亚，艺术魅力，写作手法，心理描写

Abstract

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is not only one of Mark Twain’s masterpieces, but also one of the most popular novels about children. It has attracted young readers and captured their general feeling from generation to generation. With a close textual analysis, this paper argues in what way Tom Sawyer goes along with the children’s psychology and wins the admiration of young readers. After a brief review of the previous studies on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the paper proceeds to analyze Mark Twain’s character portrayal and probes into his unique and skillful techniques of portraying the main characters in Tom Sawyer. It will then expound on the analysis of the techniques such as the description of physical features, psychological descriptions, and language used by the children. As a whole, it is found that Mark Twain’s realism is not only permanently memorized in the history of American literature but also greatly contributed to the world. The paper end with the conclusion that the charm is demonstrated by a profound understanding of Tom Sawyer’s idealism, his naiveté and innocence, his curiosity, fantasy and heroism, and through Mark Twain’s careful observation, his unconventional writing and his unique device in style.

Key words: Tom Sawyer, charm, style, psychological description

1  Introduction
Few critics today would question the preeminence of Mark Twain as a quintessential writer in the American literary arena. His novels, upon which his reputation largely rests, have affected many studies on them. Nevertheless, not all the previous studies hold the same opinion, for instance, the Concord Public Library committee says that The Adventures of Tom Sawyer contains little humor but that of a very coarse type while they do not wish to call it immoral, and characterize it as rough, coarse and inelegant, dealing with a series experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people. The present paper attempts to make a close textual analysis of Mark Twain’s world-wide published and most popular novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. On whatever level the story is read, in Leslie Fiedler’s words, “Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are the same dream dreamed twice over, the second time as nightmare; though to be sure, the terror of the second dream is already at work in the first, whose euphoria persists strangely in the second.” . The critical issue, as Bernard De Voto observed, is the novel’s language.