A Modification of the Idea of Implied Reader: With Some Examples from Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

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  • 読者の役割 : 『トム・ソーヤの冒険』を例に
  • Modification of the Idea of Implied Reader With Some Examples from Mark Twain s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

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Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) in the third person and he chose to write The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) in the first person. This seems to drive us to a comparative study of the two novels from the viewpoint of relationship between the author, the text and the reader. This will involve examining the "rhetoric of text" and the "rhetoric of discourse." Although a considerable number of studies on the stylistic features of the two novels have been made so far, most of them have been on the textual level and little seems to be observed on the discourse level. In the present article, as a step toward a comparative study of rhetoric of discourse we will make a stylistic approach to Tom Sawyer by modifying the idea of "implied reader." It is well known that "author and reader are not the only figures involved in the discourse situation" and an author assumes that with him his readers share a common fund of knowledge of the world. Such a reader is traditionally called an implied reader. In this paper we will extend the idea of implied reader a little further and try to make some possible interpretations of scenes in Tom Sawyer by focusing our attention on the rhetoric of discourse. In doing so, we may come to understand the reason why Mark Twain employed the first person narrator Huck in Tom Sawyer's companion volume Huckleberry Finn.

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