50 pages • 1 hour read
Mark TwainThe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1884A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Legacy of Slavery in the American Imagination
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is among the most celebrated and the most controversial books in American literature. The celebration is due in part to its democratic empathy, good humor, and sharply written dialogue; its controversy stems from Twain’s treatment and depiction of Black Americans, particularly Jim. Though Twain’s intentions may have been good, the novel is compromised by its archaic attitudes about race, comparative even to the best thinking of its time, and by a failure of imagination inherent to the author.
Jim is written with empathy and motivational spark far in advance of other Black characters depicted by White authors in the year 1884, and the book displays an equally rare philosophical and ironized ambivalence toward slavery. However, it’s important to put the year 1884 into context. At the time of the book’s publication, the Civil War was still fresh within living memory, and while the political ramifications of that war never ended, historians often date the end of Reconstruction with the Compromise of 1877, which saw the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, the reestablishment of Southern White supremacy, and a retrenchment of racialized anti-labor politics in the North. In the years after the Civil War, public intellectuals like Twain had a tremendous responsibility to incorporate former slaves into the economic and cultural life of the nation, both through laws and through stories. In this time intellectuals like Fredrick Douglas had to fight to be heard, and Black politicians were gradually finding their places in the halls of Congress. In short, it was a time when the future of the nation hung in the balance, in which the average American understood their responsibility for maintaining that balance, and in which nostalgia for the imagined past was likely to become a fatal and self-defeating impulse.
In this context Huckleberry Finn is a book that looks backward 40 or more years. To the degree that one of the book’s central subjects is slavery, it relitigates the issue. In Twain’s hands, an issue that thousands of people died disputing becomes a personalized struggle for one boy, and a background for gentle mockery. It may be true that Twain’s failings are less egregious than others of his contemporaries, but critics have spent a century and a half forgiving Twain and his contemporaries, both good and bad, for those failings. Twain’s reputation, as it carries forward, must be viewed with all its complications intact, and by voices more directly affected by the legacy of his mistakes.
The Moral Education of Huckleberry Finn
To Twain’s mind, the central premise of his sequel to Tom Sawyer was not the legacy of slavery or the nature of the Southern soul but Huckleberry Finn’s coming of age and the establishment of his 14-year-old character. This is a common theme in children’s literature and a hallmark of the tradition of the bildungsroman, a German word (“educational novel”) for the genre in which a youthful protagonist wrestles with the responsibilities of adulthood and spiritual growth. Twain presents these issues by sharply contrasting the characters’ foundational moral principles with their ethical actions.
Early in the book, Jim prophecies to Huck, “you gwyne to have considerable trouble in yo’ life, en considable joy […] Dey’s two gals flyin’ ’bout you in yo’ life. One uv em’s light en ’tother is dark” (26). This echoes the fatal moral seesaw Jim foresees for Huck’s father, which eventually seals the older man’s doom. In fact, Huck has two moral models in Chapter 1. His father is the worst sort of pragmatist, drifting from need to need without any plan at all, causing pain to nearly everyone he meets. His ethics are entirely selfish but also entirely self-defeating, leading to his untimely death. By contrast, Miss Watson and the widow Douglas have their inherited faith in Christian morality. When Huck asks, quite reasonably, what his Christian good works have to do with love and mutual benefits, the sisters’ hidebound reasoning offers no answers. When Miss Watson thinks to profit from selling Jim down the river, she has a wild deathbed change of heart contrary to her slavery-adjacent Christian teachings; she sets him free as one of her last acts.
Among the public criticisms Twain’s adventure first encountered was its irreverence toward organized religion, a subject Twain misses no opportunity to detour toward or linger on. Preachers’ sermons here are always either tedious or filled with hypocrisy (as with the preacher who lectures the fully armed Grangerford and Shepardson families on brotherly love). Twain’s asides cast no doubt as to his feelings. In describing the pleasure hogs have in sleeping on the cool floorboards of the church, Twain writes, “if you notice, most folks don’t go to church only when they’ve got to; but a hog is different” (115).
Despite the black-and-white quality of Jim’s prophecy and the binary nature of Huck’s models, Huck must navigate a gray moral zone when he is on his own. It is there that he finds empathy and shared humanity with Jim. When he discovers it, he has no name for it, and thinks this shared humanity is just as likely evil as it is good.
The Compromises of Freedom
A modern reader is first inclined to think of the theme of freedom in Huckleberry Finn as being exclusively about the economic and political freedom of Jim in his flight away from slavery. Indeed, Jim’s plight is the bedrock upon which Twain considers the subject, since Jim is the most abject main character in the novel in relation to his own agency. Yet as Twain reminds us, things can always get worse. The unnamed slaves who are sold away from the Wilks family do not escape the fate Jim is running from; they are sold downriver from their relatively comfortable positions to presumably far worse conditions. A hierarchy of freedom is thus established up and down the social chain, both beneath Jim and above him, with each rung upward presenting as many new choices as it does problems.
Huck’s freedom is compromised by his age and by his social condition. He is a homeless White boy raised to take care of himself. One would think that an infusion of $6,000—a small fortune—and adoption by wealthy sisters would make a big change in such a boy’s outlook regarding his freedom. Yet Huck has no sense of the value of his money except as a lure for greedy adults like his father, and as such, he tries to give it away at the first sign of pap’s approach. Likewise, he never feels less free than in the widow Douglas’s home, and he revels in the “jolly” atmosphere of being kidnapped and occasionally beaten by his father. Further up the ladder of freedom, wealthy men battle one another over small slights long forgotten or find their inheritances buried with them in a chain of scams and secrecy. In this very cynical point of view (one that, perhaps, explains the pervasiveness of slavery’s legacy in the minds of even its skeptics), there is no freedom, just service to different masters.
In Twain’s view, freedom is a situational and lonesome affair best enjoyed far away from other people, on a raft floating downstream.
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