RE:
<<At the risk of saying the obvious, switched identities were an on-going
<preoccupation for Twain.  Yes, there's a great deal of it in
<PUDD'NHEAD WILSON, but:    .......

<<--Or take HUCKLEBERRY FINN.  Huck plays a girl.  He is "George Jaxon"
at
<the Grangerfords.  He is the English valet of the purported Wilkes
<brothers.  He claims to be Charles William Albright in the "raftsman
passage."  He is Tom Sawyer in the long final section.  And in brief
passages he invents several other identities for himself (for instance,
when he talks the ferry pilot into looking for the "remainders" of his
relatives on the Walter Scott).
        Meanwhile, Tom passes the last chapters as "Sid Sawyer," the
Duke and King take on all sorts of identities, and even Jim gets
disguised as "old King Lear and a dead A-rab."

<I have trouble believing there are more identity shifts and perception
<games in PUDDN'HEAD than in HUCKLEBERRY FINN.  >>


>From my studies and my master's thesis I wrote on Twins in Twain, there
actually seems to be more identity shifts and perception games  by more
individuals in PUDD'NHEAD than in HUCK.   There are twinned characters
(Tom and Chambers and the Capello twins) not to mention all of the
imposture by Roxy and Tom, plus the duality of identity of Tom, Chambers,
and Roxy as real or perceived mulattos, visibly white, yet culturally
identified as black.    And, of course, Pudd'nhead is not a pudd'nhead as
he "solves" the mystery.

In HUCK FINN, it is mainly Huck who doubles and redoubles his identity,
and then of course Tom in the end.  I am doing a paper at this August's
Twain conference on Tom and Huck as paradigmatic twins in HUCK FINN  for
all of Twain's later twinned characters.  I'm doing more on this topic so
would love more ideas  for what I'm doing on other texts--so far I've
done TOM SAWYER, HUCK FINN, Mysterious Stranger, Hellfire Hotchkiss, and
the Prince and the Pauper)

Keep  the ideas  coming.  Thanks, Scott, for the good question.

Carolyn