Would the book have been more authentic and less criticized if Twain had shown an inclination to face up to the realities of slavery in the 1840s and to the unlikelihood that Jim could have returned to St. Petersburg as a free man who owned himself? John Seelye tested this hypothesis in 1970 by rewriting Twain’s novel as The True Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; in that version we are spared the Phelps farm episode and the book-addled reemergence of Tom Sawyer, because Jim has died a heroic death attempting to swim across the river in manacles. Although Seelye’s tour de force was an enormous sensation when it issued, it hardly became the preferred version and was seldom invoked after a few years passed. Was Mark Twain not then correct, after all, in appending eleven fairly brief chapters at the end which in effect allowed his readers to decompress from the “raft” chapters that had gone before and returned the story to the level of the three “boy book” chapters of horseplay that had opened the novel? He avoided any horrific ending—the Boggs shooting and the Shepherdson-Grangerford massacre had given us an adequate taste of violence—and got to relive and share with readers the sights, sounds, food, and general atmosphere of blissful summers at his uncle John Quarles’s farm in interior Missouri. Tom Sawyer’s exaggerated dictates may not be what most readers would prefer, but they are really no more outlandish (and much less harmful) than the nonsensical claims uttered by the King and the Duke aboard the raft and at the Wilks family’s home, or the insane feuds of warring patriarchal clans that Huck witnessed, or the bitter glimpses of human nature to which Huck was exposed along the river. The novel in effect comes to a soft, safe end of the voyage, like a raft bumping gently and finally against the land at its eventual destination. The lightning in Twain’s pen had departed, but his memories of a Missouri farm and his determination to keep the narrative within the perimeters of a boy book took over and guided him into port.
The Magnetism of Folk Speech
Jim speaks with an untutored dialect because it was against the law in nearly all slave states (including Missouri) to allow slaves to attend school or otherwise learn to read and write. Penalties for conferring the gift of literacy on a slave were quite severe after the 1830s and usually consisted of substantial prison sentences as well as fines. Huck’s own education has been so hit and miss that in numerous passages his English is not much more standard than Jim’s. Yet both Jim and Huck are sufficiently communicative when they need to be, and their phrasing is often memorable. Huck reels off scattered bits of prose poetry (“it most froze me,” “ain’t got no show,” “lazying around,” “the song-birds just going it!,” “kind of clogged up the air”) and effortlessly invents examples of onomatopoeia (the “screaking” of rafts’ sweeps, “bull-frogs a-cluttering,” axes going “k’chunk!”). Twain appears to be saying that rules of grammar cannot harness the power and aesthetic of genuine folk speech. Jim hits the right note when it matters greatly, as in Chapter 16 at the moment that Huck is wrestling with his conscience and Jim calls out (just before Huck meets two slave-catchers): “Jim won’t ever forgit you, Huck; you’s de bes’ fren’ Jim’s ever had; en you’s de only fren’ ole Jim’s got, now.”
Jim’s Acquiescence to Huck and Tom
As for the contention that Huck condescends to his fellow passenger on the raft, one can assume that Twain was determined to provide a plausible picture of his own provincial ignorance at Huck’s age. Jim, on the other hand, knows that he is utterly dependent on Huck’s goodwill to keep him from being caught. He may out of necessity give the appearance of docility, yet he is hardly a buffoon. In a novel abounding in secrets—Huck himself pretends to be murdered, Tom Sawyer hides the news of Miss Watson’s manumission of Jim, and various other characters withhold or distort information—Jim keeps mum about a monumental discovery he made in Chapter 9 that probably would have dissuaded Huck from accompanying him any farther. At the time Jim shrewdly excused the deception to Huck as “too gashly” to reveal.
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