Regarding Jim’s overly obedient subjugation to Tom Sawyer’s romantic whims about the “evasion,” let it be remembered that in Chapter 40 when the injured Tom reaches the raft and commands Huck and Jim to cast off and “man the sweeps—man the sweeps,” it is Jim who boldly declares, “I doan’ budge a step out’n dis place, ’dout a doctor; not ef it’s forty year!” He thus voluntarily and selflessly casts himself back into slavery in order to save Tom’s life. Huck agrees with Jim about the seriousness of Tom’s wound, and they withstand Tom’s protests: “He raised considerable row about it, but me and Jim stuck to it and wouldn’t budge; so he was for crawling out and setting the raft loose himself; but we wouldn’t let him. Then he gave us a piece of his mind—but it didn’t do no good.” This incident goes far to rebut the many critics who denounce Huck and Jim’s inability to resist Tom’s grandstanding.
As a prisoner on the Phelps farm, Jim is obliged to make peace with Tom’s insistence that he inscribe his dungeon wall and plant a flower in the cabin and so forth (though he firmly draws the line at the suggestion that he adopt a rattlesnake as a pet). Huck, on the other hand, follows Tom’s ever-expanding script because he relishes the entertainment, especially its flourishes and embellishments. Tom is the foil who brings invention, glory, and British and European literature into Huck Finn’s deprived existence. It is Tom who creates elaborate schemes that pretend the world is a place of intrigue, suspense, and danger—without, of course, challenging except in play the social foundations of human slavery. Yet whereas Tom laboriously manufactures the dangers, it turns out to be Huck who has the nerve to overcome actual hazards along the river and try to do something about humanity’s injustices. (Ironically, too, it is the semiliterate Huck and not the show-offy Tom who manages to compose a lengthy picaresque novel.)
Huckleberry Finn as Realist
Tom and Huck are one of the best-matched teams in literature, and even at the outset of critical commentary on the novel in the 1920s it was apparent to careful readers that Twain had in mind a younger version of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Don Quixote was one of Twain’s favorite books because, Twain declared in Life on the Mississippi, Cervantes’s work “swept the world’s admiration for the mediaeval chivalry-silliness out of existence.” A principal target of the Tom-and-Huck exchanges was the idealized fiction and poetry of English Romanticism that still in some respects overshadowed the American realistic movement of which Twain was a stalwart champion. Huck Finn’s habit of noting gross particulars, even while absorbing a sublime sight, likewise constitutes a vote against the earlier view that literature should primarily ennoble and beautify perceptions of the world. A single sentence in Huckleberry Finn aptly captures the gist of what Twain sought to accomplish in revolutionizing the outlook of fiction. Huck interrupts (in Chapter 19) his tribute to the splendor of dawn breaking over the river’s forested shoreline with a jarringly frank acknowledgment: “The breeze . . . comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh and sweet to smell, on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they’ve left dead fish laying around, gars, and such, and they do get pretty rank.” Few if any authors before Mark Twain (other than perhaps Walt Whitman) would have included in this context such an unsavory detail as the pungent odor of rotting fish.
Ernest Hemingway and Huckleberry Finn
In a semi fictional work, Green Hills of Africa (1935), Ernest Hemingway’s narrator made an astute and widely quoted pronouncement about Huckleberry Finn. The key element in this opinion was the word “modern”: “All modern American literature,” Hemingway’s character declared, “comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. . . . All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before” (italics added). Hemingway had noticed a momentous difference between Twain’s novel and its literary precursors. In “modern” literature, as opposed to much British and American fiction of the nineteenth century, the reader is no longer being coached regarding what to think of the characters and their actions. This prior type of moral guidance had typically been threaded obliquely throughout the paragraphs of a novel, or else summarized overtly at the end of a chapter or a short story.
In contrast to this previous view of the author’s role as both narrator and interpreter, Twain devised a narrator so young and inexperienced that he often cannot quite figure out what he is describing. That is the case, for instance, in Chapter 22 when Huck sneaks into a circus and relates how an intoxicated man staggers out of the audience and demands a chance to ride one of the performers’ horses. The crowd hoots and jeers at the drunk’s interruption of the show, until the ring-master reluctantly gives in and allows the man to mount one of the animals. At first Huck is fearful for the man’s safety as the trained horse races around the ring at faster and faster gaits, with the helpless man “hanging onto his neck, and his heels flying up in the air.” Then Huck (along with the crowd) is astonished when this “sot” suddenly stands up on the galloping steed, sheds layers of clothing “so thick they kind of clogged up the air,” and reveals himself to be “slim and handsome” in an acrobatic costume that was “the gaudiest and prettiest you ever saw.” Immediately he “lit into that horse with his whip and made him fairly hum.”
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 (note that Twain dropped the definite article “The” from the title page of the latter book, presumably to better fit Huck’s vernacular narrative). That middle novel, The Prince and the Pauper, 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