Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) began writing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1876, immediately after he completed The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Mightily attracted to the character of Huck, who becomes a more complete and complex character in the final chapters of Tom Sawyer, Clemens wrote the first 18 chapters fairly quickly.
The writing stalled in 1876; Clemens returned to Huck in 1880 and 1883 before completing the novel in 1884. His work on the novel was energized by his return to the Mississippi Valley during 1883. Though hailed for its humor (at times slapstick, at times biting satire), the book today is often banned in the United States because of its spotlight on race. Clemens presents a profoundly affective tale of institutionalized abuse and the psychological damage inflicted on a poor white boy and a Black man by a society that endorses prejudice and violence. Race, however, is not the only issue worth examining.
The story is set in the 1840s and is told from Huck’s point of view; his is the central consciousness, shaped by his various experiences within antebellum society. Huck is a deadpan narrator: he presents what he sees without judgment and analysis. The novel begins as a continuation of the picaresque adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn: the early chapters focus on Tom Sawyer’s gang and various escapades, from a plot to ransom hostages to a raid on a treasure-laden caravan, which Huck sees in its reality as a Sunday school picnic.
Pap Finn appears and threatens his son to gain the treasure Huck and Tom share and to reassert his control over his son’s life. However comfortable Huck becomes when he is back with his father and free of the Widow Douglas, he also knows too well the stress of physical and emotional abuse and is, at one point, willing to contemplate patricide to stop Pap’s alcoholic tantrums.
The story changes direction after Huck flees from Pap and joins up with the runaway slave Jim. Once the two unite in an attempt to find some kind of freedom, the tale focuses on the state of race relations and the possibility for redemption in personal relationships. Jim watches over Huck, at one point keeping from him the fact of Pap’s death, and the two forge a relationship based on mutual protection and need.
The question for readers becomes whether the white child who has been shaped by a virulently racist father and a social system that enforces inequality is able to form a genuine and lasting relationship with a Black man. Conversely, there is also the question of whether a Black man, schooled in the power of whites over Blacks and in the ideology that argues for his inherent inferiority, is able to break the cycle of abuse that keeps him wary of society’s constraints.
Neither Huck nor Jim has much experience with freedom, and both are continually at risk as their journey takes them further south and into the heart of slave territory.
Huck’s and Jim’s isolation, first on Jackson’s Island and later during their time on the raft, is ultimately artificial and untenable. They are not able to sustain their existence separate from society. Huck’s extended time with the Grangerfords teaches him the futility of his hope to find peace amid human feuds. He is witness to the death of Buck Grangerford and sees a family wiped out because of a jealousy that no one quite understands.
Later, with the arrival of the duke and the king, two con men in search of an easy mark, Huck is again witness to a killing (this time of old Boggs by Sherburn) and becomes involved in a plot to bilk the Wilkes sisters of their inheritance. As the novel moves into its final third, Huck is powerless to prevent the duke and the king from selling Jim back into slavery.
Each episode underscores the prevalence of physical and emotional violence and reinforces for Huck the value of being quiet and invisible when faced with adults more powerful and assured than he. His affection for Buck and Mary Jane Wilkes fails to help him find a voice. Even with the long time spent with Jim, Huck fails to assert himself when Tom Sawyer arrives at the Phelps farm and puts Jim through a painful and humiliating series of fictions in a vain and misguided attempt to release him from captivity.
The final section of the novel, known as the evasion section, continues to cause readers pain and confusion. Why is Huck complicit in Jim’s humiliation? How is it that Huck so readily sets aside his relation with Jim to assuage Tom Sawyer? Why does he still hold Tom in high regard even when he finds out that Miss Watson has manumitted Jim and that Tom disregarded Jim’s free status to work one more practical joke?
And what lessons should readers take from the story regarding racial and social justice or familial affection and friendship?
In the end, Clemens tells a tale set during antebellum years but embedded within the social context of the post-Reconstruction 1880s. The tale is still relevant today. It is a book that vibrates with a concern for the disenfranchised and marginal. Jim, who has lasting moments of humanity, remains powerless to complete his dream of reuniting his family. Huck, seared by the ranting of Pap and familiar with justice as it is defined by a society that condones and is deeply complicit in the system of slavery, resorts to a fantasy of escape.
His intention to “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest” in the book’s final paragraph underscores his inability to form lasting and complex emotional attachments. His sharp description of the social moment leaves readers shaking their heads. They want Huck to be better than he is able to be. And that hope may be at the heart of Clemens’s sense of our own inability to face the reality of the world.
Sources
Chadwick-Joshua, Jocelyn. The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998.
Doyno, Victor A. Writing Huck Finn: Mark Twain’s Creative Process. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.
Emerson, Everett. Mark Twain: A Literary Life. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.
Leonard, James S., Thomas A. Tenney, and Thadious M. Davis, eds. Satire or Evasion? Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992.
Sattelmeyer, Robert, and J. Donald Crowley, eds. One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985.
Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Edited by Victor Fischer and Lin Salamo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
———. Mark Twain’s Hannibal, Huck & Tom. Edited by Walter Blair. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.
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