The Portable Mark Twain Read Online Free PDF Page B

Barth, and many, many more) bears witness to the significance of a book that, despite its obvious faults, achieves greatness. Ernest Hemingway’s praise of Huckleberry Finn is the most familiar, but it is also typical: It is “the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”
    Evidently conceived as the product of idle leisure, Huckleberry Finn often expressed the author’s personal longings. Twain could envy Huck’s unpestered freedom and identify with his rejection of the torments of “sivilisation,” though life at the Widow’s required only minor concessions of him—mumbling over his victuals, wearing shoes and starched collars, going to school; in a word, behaving. Soon enough, however, the author recognized that Huck’s sensibility and the world he inhabited were far from idyllic. This is no “hymn” to youth; an accurate body count of the dead folks in the book might indicate it is something of a dirge instead. The mounting seriousness of the story begins to come into focus with the introduction of the abusive Pap and continues throughout (in the form of slave catchers, lynch mobs, casual bigots, cruel loafers, aristocratic murderers, mindless feuding families, conniving con men). Still, as vividly drawn as these contemptible characters are, there are no out and out villains in the book; they are not evil-doers, but they have rather blandly been disloyal to their own humanity. Huck sometimes is implicated in the disturbing events of the narrative but as often serves as perplexed witness to them, and in neither case does he reveal a damning moral judgment, merely a confused child-like sympathy. T. S. Eliot astutely observed that Huck really has no imagination but he does have “vision.” Huck “sees the real world; and he does not judge it—he allows it to judge itself.” Condemnation (moral, social, or political) is left for the adult reader; Huck is too busy getting out of one scrape after another.
    His adventures are intermittently punctuated with rare comedy, of course, but at times with unnecessary burlesque as well. It would be a mistake to forget that Huckleberry Finn is a very humorous novel, but at its heart is a troubling moral dilemma. Everything the boy has been taught upholds slavery as a sacred institution and views the slaves themselves as subhuman objects of toil or amusement. So far as he is aware, his decision, or his several decisions really, to help Jim to freedom is in the eyes of the church and the state a sin and a crime. Huck’s diverse encounters with all manner of people along the river are interesting in themselves, but the book simply would not cohere without the presence of the fugitive slave Jim.
    Excepting perhaps Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, whose exploits Twain knew well, there is no more unlikely fictional pair than Huck and Jim. One is a child; the other, a grown man. One is white; the other, black. One is an unwanted outcast; the other is valuable property, by his own reckoning worth eight hundred dollars. Huck wants to go south, eventually to the Amazon, to get shed of a cruel father, on the one hand, and a superintending guardian, on the other. Jim wants to go north to Canada, work for wages, and buy his family out of slavery. Huck wants to be free from constraint and responsibility; Jim wants the liberty to be a participant in the social order. Huck and Jim have little in common, but together they form, in Twain’s words, a “community of misfortune.” Unable to cultivate what is best in them or to express their freedom except by slipping the knot of necessity, they are collateral damage in the experiment of democracy.
    The characters seem blind to their misfortune, however. If they do not openly question society’s estimation of them, neither are they filled with self-loathing. When they grieve it is not for