What is Huckleberry Finn’s response to this obviously well-rehearsed circus act? Huck erroneously perceives it as a clever prank played by a stunt-rider on the ring-master. “The ring-master he see how he had been fooled, and he was the sickest ring-master you ever see, I reckon. Why, it was one of his own men! He had got up that joke all out of his own head, and never let on to nobody. . . . I wouldn’t a been in that ring-master’s place, not for a thousand dollars.” As with Hemingway’s minimalist short stories and clipped vignettes in In Our Time (1925), the reader rather than the author must undertake the interpretation. The author simply sketches a situation, in Twain’s book through Huck’s naive eyes, and then compels the reader to carry out the task of construing its meaning. This is the breakthrough feat that Hemingway recognized Twain had achieved for later American writers.
Underestimating Huckleberry Finn
It is possible to suppose that the main point of Huckleberry Finn is how its title character ultimately learns to view Jim as a fellow human being with valid feelings about his family and his future. That way of reading the novel is a principal reason why the boys’ ridiculous antics at the Phelps farm upset so many critics; Huck seems to fall back from the progress he had made in affirming Jim’s humanity and friendship. But we make a large mistake in merely settling for Huck’s discovery that his fellow passenger on the raft is remarkably sensitive and caring. What Twain presents is a far more complex proposition—that it is conformist and cowardly of us to take it for granted that any prevailing laws and customs, no matter how solidly established, are too sacred to be skeptically examined and intellectually tested by each of us as individuals. And this truly subversive slant to the novel challenges readers to ponder whether or not they themselves might be succumbing to social pressures by participating in practices that are in vogue and yet tremendously wrong. Twain was able to write about this sort of blindness so convincingly because he recalled how he himself had gone along with the institution of slavery through his adolescence and beyond, blithely overlooking manifold signs of its ethical and spiritual immorality.
Mark Twain wrote and published another boy book, The Prince and the Pauper: A Tale for Young People of All Ages (1881), in the interval between The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. That middle novel, though certainly worth reading, largely relied on Twain’s research in English history books and lacks the sense of “lived” experience that animates his images in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn of the Mississippi River, its villages, and its vessels. There are no other American books in the last half of the nineteenth century that offer a reader the pleasures of Twain’s two companion boy books with their ingenuity of plot and characterization, slice-of-life sharpness, penetrating irony, and sweepingly panoramic display of an entire sector of society.
The Raftsmen Episode in Huckleberry Finn
Besides reuniting Twain’s two novels, another editorial choice had to be determined for this book. Scholars have vigorously debated whether a lengthy passage extracted from the manuscript of Huckleberry Finn and published in Chapter 3 of Life on the Mississippi (1883) to illustrate the rawness of early river days should be reinserted into the novel from which it was then omitted. In this adventure Huck swims to a large raft and listens while “a mighty rough looking lot” of raftsmen drink, argue, sing, dance, and swap yarns. They discover Huck in his hiding place, threaten to “paint him a sky blue all over from head to heel,” but let him go with a stern warning. Mark Twain later agreed to delete the episode from Huckleberry Finn for fear that the public might think he was duplicating “old matter” (Twain’s words) in his new book (since he had used it previously in Life on the Mississippi) and because the publisher pointed out that Huckleberry Finn was longer than Tom Sawyer, damaging the impression that they were companion volumes.
The author went along with his publisher’s suggestion on April 22, 1884 so obligingly (“Yes, I think the raft chapter can be left wholly out”) that most subsequent editions of the novel have followed suit. This present Original Text Edition incorporates the raftsmen passage into Chapter 16 as Twain initially wrote it in his manuscript and published it in the American edition of Life on the Mississippi. That episode, with its strutting, pugnacious braggarts and its chilling ghost tale about a child’s murder, contains some of Mark Twain’s best writing. Its inclusion enables readers to savor more of Twain contributions to the then-reigning “Local Color” school of regional fiction that prized vivid descriptions of an area’s vocations and peculiarities.
Textual Emendations
With the exception of the insertion of the raftsmen passage, the texts of both novels otherwise follow the wording of the first American edition. Issues about questionable punctuation were resolved by consulting facsimiles of Twain’s manuscripts. The editor has silently modernized certain eccentricities of nineteenth-century punctuation and spelling, and has given American spellings preference over British spellings. Obvious typographical errors introduced by the printers and inconsistent spellings have been corrected. Mark Twain occasionally added footnotes to his own books; these are here placed within the text and indicated by { } brackets.
Alternative Editions
An exact facsimile of Twain’s holograph (i.e., handwritten) manuscript of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer has been published in a two-volume edition (1982), and Twain’s holograph manuscript of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is now viewable in a CD issued in 2003 by the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library. Also invaluable are the authoritative edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1980) and the magisterial edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (2003) that have been issued in The Works of Mark Twain series by the Mark Twain Project at Berkeley.
Dr. Alan Gribben co-founded the Mark Twain Circle of America, compiled Mark Twain’s Library: A Reconstruction, and recently co-edited Mark Twain on the Move: A Travel Reader. Gribben has written numerous essays about Mark Twain’s life and image. He teaches on the English faculty of Auburn University at Montgomery and edits the Mark Twain Journal.
Selected Relevant Print and Digital Works
Arac, Jonathan. “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” in The Novel, Volume I: History, Geography, and Culture. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
____________. Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.
Beidler, Peter G. “The Raft Episode in Huckleberry Finn,” Modern Fiction Studies 14 (Spring 1968): 11–20.
Black, Ronald J. “The Psychological Necessity of the Evasion Sequence in Huckleberry Finn,” CEA Critic 52 (Summer 1990): 35–44.
Blair, Walter. Mark Twain & Huck Finn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960.
Bray, Robert. “Tom Sawyer Once and For All,” Review 3 (1981): 75–93.
Budd, Louis J. “The Recomposition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Missouri Review 10, no. 1 (1987): 113–129.
___________. “The Southward Currents Under Huck Finn’s Raft,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 46 (1949): 222–237.
Carey-Webb, Allen. “Racism and Huckleberry Finn: Censorship, Dialogue, and Change,” English Journal 82 (November 1993): 22–34.
Chadwick-Joshua, Jocelyn. “Ebonics, Jim, and New Approaches to Understanding Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in Making Mark Twain Work in the Classroom. Ed. James S. Leonard. Durham,