Literary Analysis of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Points to be covered:
- The Socio-Historical Background
- The hypocrisy and Hostility of the civilized world
- Huck and The American Hero
- The Mississippi river as a Symbol of freedom
- The Struggle between the Sound Heart and The Deformed Conscience
- The growth into maturity
1.The Socio-Historical Background
- Events in the story take place during the 1840s when Missouri was still a slave-
owning state. Before the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 the slave system
was considered to be a natural and inevitable feature of the social and economic
life. This system allowed white men to own Negroes and treat them as their
properties .
- The settings of both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are Hannibal, Missouri,
the riverside town of Twain’s childhood , and the Mississippi river upon which
he worked as a steamboat pilot in his early manhood. In Tom Sawyer, the town
was portrayed as a beautiful, sleepy place where even the villains had a certain
charm . Yet, the world of Huckleberry Finn is clearly very far removed from the
idealistic setting of Tom Sawyer . Hannibal , as well as the other small
townships , is characterized by squalor , violence and hypocrisy. This radical
difference is indicative of the author’s changed attitude to the society and
culture of his boyhood home
2. The Hypocrisy and Hostility of the Civilized World
During the adventures, Huck is thrown out into a very hypocritical hostile world. In
this world , we see the people of the small riverside towns as mean, cruel, greedy , and
hypocritical . In his portrayal of the Grangerford family we see an old , aristocratic
clan, who , in spite of their surface charm , have become corrupt and barbaric . He
witnesses the wholesale slaughter of the Granger fords and the cold-blooded shooting
of old Boggs. The casual violence is all pervasive. Such violence stirs a mood of
general apathy and distrust among the characters . Boggs’s death drives the reader’s
attention to a serious and dark aspect of the southern society. Boggs is shot to death in
front of his daughter and with a crowd of people watching the murder .
The lust of money cannot be resisted in the civilized society. Miss Watson could not
resist the eight hundred corrupting dollars offered her by the nigger trader for the
Negro Jim. The king and the duke perform their monstrous frauds for money alone and
finally betray Jim for forty dollars. Twain used the characters of the King and the
Duke as vehicle for his satire . Both men prosper because of the shortcomings of the
people they cheat . In such episodes as the camp meeting in chapter 20 the antics of
these rogues serve to reflect the flaws in the community’s views of life.
3. Huck and The American Hero
Huckleberry Finn is a book in which the hero tries to escape from society in an attempt
to gain personal freedom in the wilderness . In this respect, it belongs to the
mainstream tradition of the American hero . Many of the greatest books of the 19 th c
fiction in America tell of the central character’s efforts to retain his true identity and
integrity in the outback , away from organized societies. In these works, the town
constitutes a threat to all that the hero values most in life. A recurring motif in many of
these works is the hero ridding off into the wilderness at the end of the drama , having
found the town to have a corrosive influence on his freedom . Perhaps the most
obvious example of this theme is to be found in The Leatherstocking novels of James
Fenimore Cooper ( 1789-1851). In books like The Pioneers (1823) , and The Prairie
(1827) , Natty Bumppo , the main character , attempts to escape from the barbaric
settlers who are, piecemeal, taking over the land and traditions of the native Indians.
The rejection of society by writers such as Mark Twain and James Fenimore Cooper is
peculiar to the American literary tradition . However its roots can be found in the
European romantic thought of the late 18thc and early 19 th c . Romanticism saw a
conflict between human innocence and social experience . Romantic thinkers like the
French philosopher , Jean Jacques Rousseau , located a break between man and society
and between nature and civilization. From the end of the 18 th c this attitude became a
commonplace of the critique of the industrial and urban society , and it informed the
writings of many writers . These writers often took the child as the symbol of true
innocence and happiness. Mark Twain’s preoccupation with ‘boy-life out on the
Mississippi provided him with a perfect dramatic metaphor through which to express
his own sense of the conflict between the joy of man in nature and the corruption of
man in society.
4. The Mississippi river as a Symbol of freedom
In Huckleberry Finn the biggest symbolic significance of the Mississippi River lies in
the freedom and justice that the main character is looking for . After escaping the
cruelty and the hypocrisy of the adult world , Huck started to find in the mystical
Mississippi River the infinite power whereby he achieves his freedom. Floating on the
raft down the Mississippi river, Huck notices that the new life is quite different from
that on the bank. The raft is the symbol of freedom, harmony and purity . In pure
nature, there is no slavery, no discrimination, and no deceit . Equally important, Huck
and Jim are equal to each other. They cooperate with each other to deal with the
hardship of the shore. Therefore , the river clarifies and purifies Huck’s conscience,
which has been ill trained by the deceitful civilized world. When Huck and Jim
encounter disheartening and startling things on the shore , they retreat to the river and
lay on the raft, to find comfort . Having escaped from the feud in chapter 18, Huck
thinks that “there wasn’t home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped
up and smothery, but a raft doesn’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on
a raft.” (128). It is striking that whenever Huck comes into contact with the people
along the river he is forced to assume a false identity . His initial escape from his cruel
father and the society of St Petersburg forces him to feign his own death. Huck’s true
life can only be achieved by dying in the eyes of the people and by escaping down the
Mississippi.
5. The Struggle between The Sound Heart and The Deformed Conscience
Huck is an almost unique fictional creation, a character of true goodness and nobility
who succeeds in being totally convincing. We need only to compare him to Dickens’
Oliver Twist to realize the extent of Twain’s achievement in his portrayal of the boy.
This is due largely to the striking contrast between his physical raggedness and his
good nature. The contrast is expressive of an ironic reversal of the predominant
situation in the novel where a pleasing surface usually conceals a corrupt reality, as in
the Grangerford household . It is precisely because he is such an embodiment of
human goodness that Huck engages all the reader’s sympathies. His kindness is always
unconscious and spontaneous , arising out of the deepest recesses of his nature. Huck
is always concerned with the welfare of others and cannot bear to see anyone suffer.
We notice this in his concern for the drunk man in the circus in chapter22, and in his
sympathy for the niece of Peter Wilks in chapter26 . His sympathy even includes those
who are totally undeserving of his attention such as the stranded robbers in chapter 13,
and the King and the Duke when they have been tarred and feathered in chapter 33.
It is because Huck is such a good and decent person that his moral dilemma in helping
a Negro slave to escape constitutes a profound condemnation of the way of life and
moral values of the American South. His conscience has been formed by the morality
of St Petersburg, and he struggles to free himself of that society’s corrupt standards.
Huck ‘s deformed conscience is the measure of the moral corruption of the
community which shaped it . Mark Twain wanted to show through Huck Finn, that it
is a mistake to consider the "dwarf conscience" as the "voice of God". His protagonist
will, therefore, free himself from the tyranny of conscience only if he is able to
maintain a critical distance from the dictates of his corrupt society This fact becomes
dramatically apparent when, in chapter 31, Huck chooses to be damned rather give Jim
up to his owner , Miss Watson: “all right, then, I’ll go to hell”.
The fact that Huck is willing to sacrifice his own soul to hell for Jim’s sake shows the
tremendous amount of personal growth that he has undergone. In the earlier chapters
our protagonist would never have considered making such a sacrifice. His encounter
with the slaveholders and the story he fabricated about the smallpox show his
determination to protect this fugitive slave, even at the peril of conventional norms.
Huck’s decision to save Jim symbolizes the victory of his sound heart over his
deformed conscience, and more importantly his ripeness into moral agency .
.
6. The growth into maturity
The voyage on the raft with Jim is, for Huck, a voyage towards moral discovery .
Throughout his raft journey , Huck has acquired a profound knowledge of human
depravity. The civilized facade of his Southern America brings him to challenge the
conventional norms and establishes his own standard of justice. But our protagonist’s
rite passage into maturity was fraught with hardships and challenges. At first, Huck
seems to respond favorably to the prevailing stereotypical picture drawn about the
black slaves. So, he looks upon the Negro slave with eyes conditioned by the attitudes
of St Petersburg . He does not see black people as equals and he refers to Jim as
merely a piece of property. In the very beginning, Huck tricks on Jim and makes fun of
Jim. He considers Jim inferior in status. When a snake bit Jim due to his prank, Huck
did not express concerns for Jim’s safety. Huck’s indifferent comportment towards Jim
started to undergo change after the fog. The fog separates Huck and Jim. Jim is so
worried about Huck and he seeks for him desperately on the raft. However, Huck
hoaxes him into believing that he only had a dream. When Jim knows the truth, he
criticizes him severely. Jim’s reaction brought Huck into awareness that Jim is a man
with strong self-esteem. He was forced to humble himself to a nigger and make an
apology to him .) This is the turning point in his attitude towards slaves, and it is also
the first step towards his struggle against conventional norms. The Negro slave is no
longer regarded as an subordinate companion , but becomes a respect friend with
whom he struggles against the tyranny of the southern America
When the raft approaches the city of Cairo, Huck feels more and more upset. For Jim,
Cairo symbolizes freedom. For Huck, it represents the prison of moral conflict.
Battling with his deformed conscience, Huck hovered on the brink to give Jim up.
However, when a passing raft comes alongside Huck’s canoe, his sound heart triumphs
and he saves Jim by lying. This is the second step for Huck to separate with the power
of traditional conventions. His stance towards the slave hunters and the way he was
adamant to protect his black friend underscore a strong determination to combat
societal norms and conventional standards. The struggle against society was first
fueled by his sound heart , then sponsored by his own morals and standards which are
completely detached from the conventional dictates of his environment . To put it
more bluntly, the struggle was underwritten by a moral ripeness requiring him to
protect this black slave and see him as his equal.
