Huck Finn: The Novel of America

About a year ago I had the opportunity to accompany my parents and my brothers and sister on a trip to the Andalusia region of Spain, where my Dad had served a proselyting mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints more than fifty years ago.  We went to different places in the region and got to see the Alhambra in Granada, the Cathedrals in Toledo and Sevilla, and numerous other impressive sights.  Many old cities like those are walkable, meaning that they were built during a time when roads only really needed to accommodate foot traffic, and I was captivated by how many ancient structures and works of art I saw just walking around.

Walking around the different cities, I couldn’t help but wonder why more places in my own country, the United States of America, aren’t structured similarly.  I soon answered my own question by reminding myself how young my native country is compared to many of the other nations of the world.  My nation will celebrate its 250th birthday next July, in contrast I crossed a bridge in Cordoba, Spain that was built by the ancient Romans.

Every nation or civilization, no matter how old or young, has its own literature and artistic identity.  Despite its relative youth, the United States of America is no exception to this.  Ernest Hemingway, one of my nation’s most well-known authors, opined in 1935 that “all modern American Literature” can be traced back to a single purely American work published in 1885 by a former Mississippi River boat captain.  That author was Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name of Mark Twain, the work is “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, often referred to as “Huck Finn”.

“Huck Finn” is one of my favorite books, and I can’t argue with Mr. Hemingway’s opinion about it being the seminal work in American Literature to which all subsequent literary works of the region can be traced.  A big reason for this is that the work is completely American in its subject matter.

Other earlier works of American Fiction by the likes of James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving were set in America but were often either set before the Revolution or largely followed new settlers to the area, such as Washington Irving’s legendary short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, which focuses on a town mostly inhabited by Dutch settlers.  In contrast, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” takes place in and around the fictional town of St. Petersburg, Missouri with a cast of characters who as far as we know are multi-generational Americans, the work is also devoid of the strong European influence of earlier American novels.

Unlike Twain’s previous work, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”, the title character of “Huck Finn” narrates the story.  Huck is semi-literate, by that I mean that he can read and write but those skills are fundamental and he wouldn’t be considered eloquent in speaking, teenage boy who prior to the events of “Tom Sawyer” was essentially an aimless vagrant in the community who many of the adults in town thought was a bad influence on the other kids.  Huck’s narration of the story is done in the vernacular of that region during the 1840s, about twenty years prior to the American Civil War, and thus gives the work a very uniquely American feel in which a reader can’t help but become immersed.

The work is completely authentic as it comes from a writer who grew up in the region in which it is set.  Mark Twain was born and raised in Missouri and wrote the character of Huck Finn speaking in the manner to which he would have been exposed growing up in the port town of Hannibal, the town on which the fictional St. Petersburg in “Tom Sawyer” and “Huck Finn” is based.

Rather than being a sweeping romantic epic telling a story of some kind of big event or thrilling almost otherworldly adventure, “Huck Finn” unflinchingly deals with and addresses many real issues facing the U.S. during the time period in which it is set.  In addition to being a great writer and orator, Mark Twain was a legendary satirist and would often use his literary works to attack institutions and philosophies with which he disagreed.  “Huck Finn” might be the best example of him doing this as in the course of events of the novel he addresses issues such as hypocrisy, blind devotion to organized religion and/or societal norms, and especially racism.  Many, if not all, of the issues addressed in this work are still prevalent today and still require attention.

For anyone who is not familiar with the novel, the basic story is that Huck Finn’s drunken and abusive father takes him from the Widow Douglass and her sister Miss Watson, who are serving as his guardians.  After surviving an attack from his father, Huck fakes his death and escapes to a nearby island.  While there he comes across Jim, an enslaved man owned by Miss Watson who is fleeing after hearing her consider selling him to a Slave Trader in New Orleans.  The rest of the novel follows Huck and Jim as they travel on the Mississippi River in an attempt to get Jim to the Free States.

There are many books that are considered classics that I don’t care for, and some that make me wonder why they are even considered classics.  Huck Finn is not one of these as I completely recognize why it is a classic and it would be one of my favorite books even without its status as a classic and arguably THE great American novel.  I’m not sure if he meant to, but Mark Twain wrote a true American Morality Tale in “Huck Finn”.  The moral lessons taught in this story are all presented through its title character, and his story is among the most compelling, challenging, and often heartwarming ones that I have ever had the pleasure to come across.

The character of Huck Finn is very much indicative of where the nation of the United States was at the time being depicted.  At the beginning of the novel, Huck has gone from living a life of liberation largely free from the constraints of society to a more structured lifestyle with two guardians determined to “civilize” him.  This is similar to the fledgling United States that was still transitioning from a group of colonies largely composed of frontier land into a modern nation.

I feel that in addition to the issues I mentioned earlier, Mark Twain is also questioning the need for a societal structure.  While Huck and Jim are floating down the Mississippi in a pine raft attempting to secure Jim’s freedom, it becomes clear that the two of them being on the river have already obtained a kind of freedom.  When they are on the river Jim isn’t enslaved and Huck doesn’t have to conform to the rigid rules of society looking to make him conform to what they believe to be best for him.

The aspect of this work, and its title character, that strikes me the most is how Mark Twain creates a character that is a living embodiment of pure, uncorrupted morality.  Prior to the American Civil War, Missouri was a slave state and much of the country had gone through a period of religious revival where a renewed importance on Christian faith was kindled.  Missouri’s status as a slave state would be solidified in the mid to late 1850s during a period of intense violence known as Bleeding Kansas where many Missourians would attempt to ensure that the proposed new state of Kansas on its western border would enter the union as a slave state.  The Bleeding Kansas period was the final evidence that the issue of slavery would not be resolved peacefully, and the American Civil War immediately followed.

In these circumstances, Huck Finn would have been taught that slavery was acceptable if not absolutely right.  He also would not have been able to get away from religion completely, we find out in the novel that Huck has at least been taught how to pray, and would have either been invited or enticed to accept the Christian faith if it hadn’t already been forced on him to an extent.  Mark Twain was famously against all forms of racism and prejudice, even though he served in a Confederate Militia based in his native Missouri for all of two weeks before his unit was disbanded at the beginning of the Civil War and he moved west.  Despite these factors in the life of Huck Finn and his creator, both of them were able to recognize right from wrong even when the society around them either could not or chose not to.

Huck’s own moral superiority to the society around him due to not being corrupted by those institutions is best displayed in my favorite passage from the novel.  At one point in the story, Huck is wondering if he should facilitate Jim being returned to Miss Watson.  Huck voices his inner conflict and resolution in the following manner:

It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I couldn't try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn't come. Why wouldn't they? It warn't no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from ME, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn't come. It was because my heart warn't right; it was because I warn't square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting ON to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth SAY I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger's owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie--I found that out.

So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn't know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I'll go and write the letter--and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:

Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send.

HUCK FINN.

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking--thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a- floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he's got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

"All right, then, I'll GO to hell"--and tore it up.

There aren’t many things that get me emotional, but this passage is one of them.  I can’t help but be moved inside when I read about this boy, whose society deems him ignorant and undesirable, being able to do what many of the educated and prominent people in that same society won’t by seeing beyond the institutions of his time and place and being able to simply comprehend what the right thing to do is, and then having the decency and courage to do it even though society would condemn him for it.

I view “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” as a quintessential American novel that should be required reading for every American, and anyone who wants to become a citizen of this fine nation, as it not only goes over a pivotal part of the nation’s history but also challenges us to ponder what it means to be an American and what that should look like in action.  Anyone who has read my post about “Fahrenheit 451” knows that I am against censorship, and it upsets me that “Huck Finn” has been a target of criticism and censorship since its publication.

Huck Finn has often been banned in U.S. schools with the reasons for this often being claims that the book uses racial stereotypes and for its frequent use of the racial slur “nigger”, including in the passage I cited earlier.  In addition to being against censorship, the reasons for banning this work appall me because they are essentially against acknowledging that the history of America is not without blemish.

Mark Twain wrote this book in the language of his boyhood in Hannibal, Missouri.  That language, warts and all, lets us see what the prevailing attitudes were at that time.  When we read this, it gives us a great opportunity to examine ourselves and the time in which we live.  We are given the opportunity to directly compare our conduct, language, and attitude with that of long ago and see how far we and the society around us have progressed…if at all.  Ignoring these sorts of blemishes in a nation’s history is not the way to rise above them and move on, they have to be confronted, acknowledged, properly condemned, and not repeated if anything is going to be improved.  In the words of the philosopher George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.

Mark Twain gave many gifts to the world, especially to his own country as his works and the man himself helped to shape its identity.  In my opinion, the greatest single gift he gave was the story of Huckleberry Finn and its unforgettable depiction of my country as it was, with the challenge to rise above its past.  I hope that my nation and its people will be more like Huck Finn, not wild and unruly, but not overly “civilized” and bound to the customs of a given time; not blindly devoted to any kind of ideal, and able to inherently recognize right from wrong with the courage to do what is right regardless of the consequences.