The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

*contains spoilers*

It is tempting to say that if The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is Mark Twain’s Iliad, then his follow up, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is his Odyssey.

The earlier text, Tom Sawyer, published in 1876, concerns the fun but also frequently violent exploits of its titular character alongside his friends in and around the town of St Petersburg, Missouri (based on the town of Hannibal, in which Mark Twain – or Samuel Langhorne Clemens – spent his own boyhood years) between the years of 1830-40. This would make the American South in which the adventures were specifically situated, and indeed in which the book was written and published, pre-civil war (1861-5) and pre-Emancipation Proclamation (issued by Abraham Lincoln on 1^st January 1863). Whilst the former point on the context of the narrative is also very much true of Huckleberry Finn, taking place ‘forty to fifty years ago’ according to the frontispiece to the 1884 edition published in London by Chatto and Windus (notably one year before the publication in the US, in 1885), the latter point on the book’s authorship and publication, as you can see, comes after Lincoln’s Proclamation – and also whilst the wheels of the Union’s cannons still rolled in pursuit of Robert E. Lee’s traitorous and (let’s be frank, here) deeply racist Confederate Army.

Such a tumult of societal and political destabilisation and reflection taking place between the two novels might to some extent explain the disparity in their presentation. Whilst Tom Sawyer concerns events in and around the central and characteristic (each town had its own personality, does it not) St Petersburg, just as The Iliad took place in and around the bastion of Troy, Huck Finn starts off in St Petersburg before whisking us all upon a raft drifting down the Mississippi to many new and problematic locations and situations. Indeed, as Odysseus leaves behind the burning wreckage of the successfully besieged and now razed Troy, he sets sail for his homeland of Ithaca only to encounter many more different and disturbing disruptions along the way. Also, in the same way that the civil war’s shattering of American givens will no longer pass as normative, neither legally nor ethically – for the emancipation of an entire race and class has to some degree unshackled the chains not only of those long-suffering slaves but also so many of the perpetuated lies about American freedom and equality (upheld by the interpretation [or misinterpretation] of scripture) – so things will never be the same for the boys following their famous and dangerous exploits in Tom Sawyer. And only the voice of a living and thinking American person, not the long-passed decrees of God, can do the explaining. As a result, we therefore see the omniscient narrative voice that relayed the exploits in Tom Sawyer transition to the first-person narrative voice in Huck Finn:

‘You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.’ (Chapter 1)

No longer can the voice of a higher authority make the claims of what has been experienced, and nor can they be trusted. Only those who have seen will know, and thus will have the material to adequately explain – and Huck has seen, and he will tell you exactly how he saw it in his own, idiosyncratic method of speech (or, in this case, writing, which in some moments is taken for speech and in others taken for written record – malapropisms included). I must say, that, when I read these passages on the opening page of this book, witnessing the bold metafiction of authorial self-reference (and the ensuing doubt over its veracity), I’m not above deviating from my attempt at an analytical assessment of the text to admit that I marvelled and giggled out loud in such a giddy way. I loved Tom Sawyer, and I was already in adoration of Huck Finn. Not least did I appreciate, through the pen of Mark Twain, Huck’s slight criticism of the man who had brought him so to life. The ‘mainly’ of ‘and he told the truth, mainly’ does so very much in the way of encouraging the reader to position themselves at a point of sceptical consideration of what has been presented to them previously, and of course what Huck will go on to present in his arbitrary account. One is moved to ask, where did this allegedly omniscient narrator screw up, and how? Indeed, such a doubt of one’s own creator on the part of Huck Finn might encourage the reader to reserve their own same scepticism for their maker, God, who set the standard by which we’re all supposed to live, though it was He who held the pen which is supposed to have created us all in His own, perfect image – and to have made so many suffer as a consequence.

Indeed, after reporting on so many of the tragic and inhumane horrors of the American Civil War, Twain understood the limits of what belief can offer when having witnessed such failures in man to extend basic respect to one-another’s rights – especially in the self-proclaimed ‘land of the free’. The systems of power, patently, had served so little those who deserved justice so very much – and it was only the boldness of certain figures, either by words or arms, which brought about some semblance of justice. Even after the relative freedom of the enslaved was won following so many long and bloody battles, for as long as it will make some men very rich, inequality will in its various guises be excused and upheld in accordance with religious belief by some stretch of an enfeebled imagination. As Twain himself once put it in a letter to his brother Orion and his sister Mary in October 1865, some six months after the conclusion of the American Civil War, ‘I have a religion – but you will call it blasphemy. It is that there is a God for the rich man but none for the poor.’ One cannot help but think that it is only the fresh eyes of successive generations that will be capable of calling into account the hypocrisies of those who have gone before. In similar fashion, Telemachus, son of Odysseus, in seeking out his father in order to rid his home of the plague of suitors pounding at Penelope’s door, observes the aftereffects of the siege of Troy as he goes searching for his father, finding Menelaus grieving for the loss of so many comrades in pursuit of something of which he so felt so jealously deserving: Helen. In the wake of the long and destructive war, it is the son who must find new ways to unbuckle the yoke of old and perpetuated claims – in this case, the claims upon women, oppressed in their own fashion when seen merely as accessories of status to be acquired as booty.

Contrary to the dynamic of Telemachus seeking out his long-lost father Odysseus, Huck in fact flees the violently oppressive and exploitative grip of his previously long-absent father, who steals Huck away from St Petersburg with the intent of obtaining the riches Huck had banked at the end of his adventures with Tom Sawyer. For Huck’s father, financial gain is prioritised over the well-being and nurture of his lineage: ‘Pretty soon he was all tired out, and dropped down with his back against the door, and said he would rest a minute and then kill me. He put his knife under him, and said he would sleep and get strong, and then he would see who was who.’ (Chapter 6) The constative nature with which Huck describes the threat of death he faces from his own father not only lays bare the basic fact of the horrors he suffers, and the violent end awaiting him, but also the normalisation of his experience of such daily woe. The nobility of conduct that existed in Greek culture and mythology, exhibited in the actions of both father and son on behalf of one-another in The Odyssey, is replaced in Huck Finn with brutal, money-grabbing self-interest in a still-fledgling capitalist America. However, Huck Finn is not devoid of noble conduct. Far from it. And, when the clever and witty flourish of Mark Twain’s pen conjures it, it is with a healthy dose of concentrated irony for the post-Civil-War American reader, its prescription of bitter medicine long overdue. Such an example comes through Jim, an escaped slave, who shows his younger, white, and profoundly more liberated counterpart Huck Finn the most unconditional of love, support, and appreciation throughout the troubles they encounter together and apart during the novel:

‘Goodness gracious, is dat you, Huck? En you ain’ dead – you ain’ drownded – you’s back agin? It's too good for true, honey, it'd too good for true [...] jis de same ole Huck – de same ole Huck, thanks to goodness!’ (Chapter 15)

Each and every time Jim refers to Huck as ‘honey’, I swear my heart softened to jelly. How blood continued to circulate my body, I know not. Maybe Gregory House can interrogate and explain in a one-off special episode. But it did, and I was able to continue reading. And what I bore witness to was Mark Twain’s perseverance in acknowledging and making room for the humanity of those within American society (or, more aptly, those forced to remain marginalised from and peripheral to it) by positioning them in front of the reader through the innocent and playful eyes of two children who saw their elders’ maintenance of social systems but could not fathom their establishment or perpetuation when experience brought them into sharp relief. How the American reader must have taken this internally can, to a large extent, only really be speculated; but one hopes that the stomach churned at their realisation that human beings so worthy of affection as Jim could have been put through so much thus far in their history.

There is so much more to be said about this text – not least Tom Sawyer’s entertaining and resolving cameo, which brought to my mind Cervantes’s Don Quixote and its titular character’s application of literary precedence in the context of “real life” (and yet still obviously within the confines of a presented narrative – ha!). But I can see I’m already approaching 2,000 words. Yikes! Anyway, let this be a validation of these texts of adventure, the horizons of which, I believe, are yet still uncharted. I urge you to embark upon them at the flick of their pages, and to find out for yourselves!