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From Tom Sawyer to Huckleberry Finn: Toward Godly Play

That Mark Twain was a habitual game-player in both his life and his work is a fact almost too obvious to state. The man who conceived the "Empire City Massacre" and "Petrified Man" hoaxes, who read his facetious Whittier birthday-dinner speech to a particularly unplayful audience, who patented a history game pretentiously called "Mark Twain's Memory-Builder: A Game for Acquiring and Retaining All Sorts of Facts and Dates" among his other ill-fated commercial ventures, and who peopled his writings with playful narrators, practical jokers, and perpetrators of hoaxes, as well as the archetypal playing child, the two most memorable con men in American literature, and a Yankee who played against an entire kingdom and nearly won—is among American writers our clearest example of Homo ludens. But to recognize Twain's game-playing is not to fully appreciate it or to acknowledge its importance in his literature. Play and games are central to his fiction to an extent that is unique among nineteenth-century American writers. From Tom Sawyer to The Mysterious Stranger the moral vision of each of Twain's major novels is based somehow on ideas of legitimate and illegitimate games, of authentic and inauthentic playing. To write fiction, of course, is to "play" with words and ideas, and some writers are more explicitly playful than others. Twain is not just one of these playful artists, but one who uses specific games and modes of playing in his novels to define character and even to express a basic vision of life. Life is a game in novel after novel, but what may be today a simple-minded cliché is, in Twain's fiction, a conception capable of meaningful variation; to say that life is a game can fundamentally affirm the significance of human existence or inspire despair over its futility. It is possible to trace a declining faith in human