Huck's moral enlightenment

The novel exhibits three patterns of evidence concerning Huck's moral enlightenment. The first, and most celebrated, is developmental. In a series of episodes Huck gradually comes to recognize that Jim is a human being whose blackness dissolves, whose chains fall away, under the transforming power of friendship. Huck doesn't learn easily. Soon after he meets him on Jackson's Island, Huck plays a trick on Jim by coiling a dead rattlesnake on his blanket, "thinking there'd be some fun when Jim found him there." When Jim is bitten, Huck's reaction centers on himself rather than on Jim: "That all comes of my being such a fool as to not remember that wherever you leave a dead snake its mate always comes there and curls around it. . . . Then I slid out quiet and throwed the snakes clear away amongst the bushes; for I warn't going to let Jim find out it was all my fault, not if I could help it." And while Jim is suffering, Huck is unconcerned enough to debate the relative potency of rattlesnake bites and Pap's whiskey.

His next trick comes after they have been separated in the fog. Huck, for a time, persuades a sleepy Jim that the episode was a dream. When Jim finally sees the debris on the raft and untangles its meaning, he lectures the white boy for the first and last time:

En when I wake up en fine you back agin', all safe en soun', de tears come en I could a got down on my knees en kiss' yo' foot I's so thankful. En all you wuz thinkin 'bout wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren's en makes 'em ashamed.

Huck accepts this lesson, humbles himself to Jim, and resolves to give up playing tricks on his friend. His resolve is tested immediately, and it holds. When two armed men in a skiff, searching for runaway blacks, challenge him on the river—"Is your man white or black?"—Huck responds with "He's white" and uncorks one of his Homeric lies to prevent the men from checking.

Jim is out of sight in the Grangerford chapters; and he is subdued, roped, and painted blue during the siege of the raft by the king and the duke. But Huck's newly won insight holds firm. He recognizes Jim's humanity and tells us that "he cared just as much for his people as white folks does for their'n. It don't seem natural, but I reckon it's so." This compassion arms Huck for his most difficult battle. When Jim is sold by the king to Silas Phelps, Huck is forced to review the companionship established during their rafting journey and choose between his love for Jim and his duty to report a runaway slave."It was a close place," thinks Huck, in his steamboat vernacular, but he churns through with the courage and resolution of Horace Bixby running a dangerous channel at night. Huck rejects duty, religion, society, and his conscience, and chooses Jim by destroying the letter to Miss Watson and deciding to steal Jim out of slavery once more: "All right, then, I'll go to hell." After this moral crisis the novel, engineered by Tom Sawyer, takes its notorious downhill slide. Although he is powerless to stem Tom's evasion, Huck remains true to his friendship and to his opinion of Jim. When Jim refuses to go further until Tom's wound is treated, even though it will resuit in recapture, Huck summarizes the essential lesson of his adventures: "I knowed he was white inside."

The development of Huck's awareness of Jim's humanity provides satisfying narrative and moral continuity, but it apparently fails to harmonize with a second pattern of evidence. Many passages throughout the novel, and especially after Huck has presumably learned his lesson in Chapter 31, give us pause. Huck tells us that Jim's ignorance proves "you can't learn a nigger to argue." He is appalled by Jim's freedom fever as they near the clear waters of the Ohio, and by his talk of stealing his children out of slavery, if necessary.

It most froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn't ever dared to talk such talk in his life before. Just see what a difference it made in him the minute he judged he was about free. It was according to the old saying, "give a nigger an inch and he'll take an ell." Thinks I, this is what comes of my not thinking. Here was this nigger which I had as good as helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children—children that belonged to a man I didn't even know; a man that hadn't ever done me no harm.

"Well," Huck says, when the king and the duke stage their lost-brother routine, "if ever I struck anything like it, I'm a nigger." Mistaken for Tom Sawyer late in the novel, Huck invents a steamboat disaster to explain his delayed appearance to Aunt Sally:

"We blowed out a cylinder-head."
"Good gracious! anybody hurt?"
"No'm. Killed a nigger."
"Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt."

And at the end of the book Huck is relieved to discover that Jim had been free during the escapades on Silas Phelps' farm, so no blame can be attached to Tom as an abolitionist: "I couldn't ever understand, before, until that minute and that talk, how he could help a body set a nigger free, with his bringing-up." All this suggests that Huck somehow hasn't totally learned his lesson, that his knowledge about Jim is incomplete, that the smooth flow of moral development contains more rough water than first appeared.

These two contradictory patterns are further complicated by a third. A number of passages suggest that Huck has no need of moral development, that he has an instinctive compassion for Jim from the beginning. In Chapter 2, Tom Sawyer suggests that they "tie Jim [who is asleep] to the tree for fun." Huck's reply is instantaneous: "But I said no; he might wake and make a disturbance, and then they'd find out I warn't in." Huck's reply may be straightforward and thus show more concern for himself than Jim, but it may also be a lie to protect Jim and to dodge Tom's ridicule. Twice in the chapter Tom wants to trick Jim, and both times Huck refuses. When they meet on Jackson's Island, Huck quickly recovers from the "fan-tods" of finding his refuge inhabited: "I bet I was glad to see him. . . . I was ever so glad to see Jim." And Jim easily (and permanently, it turns out) extracts a promise from Huck not to tell on him: "I said I wouldn't, and I'll stick to it. Honest injun I will. People would call me a low down Ablitionist and despise me for keeping mum—but that don't make no difference. I ain't agoing to tell." Huck's gift of friendship, offered instinctively and immediately and never withdrawn, generates a striking shift in pronouns in his cry of warning when Huck discovers that Mr. Loftus is hunting Jim for the reward money: ""Git up and hump yourself, Jim! There ain't a minute to lose. They're after us!""

These three patterns—moral development, moral backsliding, moral stasis—complicate but do not contradict the lesson of honesty, justice, and mercy first recognized by Joel Chandler Harris. They fit together in a plausible whole as Mark Twain suggested in his 1895 notebook entry about "a book of mine where a sound heart & a deformed conscience come into collision & conscience suffers defeat." Huck Finn does have a sound heart which beats steadily throughout the novel. In the first chapters and the last (although he fails to divert Tom Sawyer's tricks on Jim which bracket the novel) and in the rafting adventures between, Huck consistently, inevitably it seems, chooses the path of compassion. But there is development. As he comes to know Jim better, his sympathy, respect, and comradeship all deepen. "Miss Watson's big nigger, named Jim" (Chapter 2) becomes simply "Jim" as Huck discovers that this particular nigger is a man like any other man, a friend unlike any other friend. But Huck is unable to generalize from his experience. He has no insights into the Negro question. He never renounces slavery. The disquieting negatives that appear throughout—the clichés about learning a nigger to argue or giving him an inch; the cylinder-head manslaughter—are the products of Huck's diseased conscience, caught from a corrupt society, but they do not intrude in his relationship with Jim. Huck's age of innocence is below the age of abstraction, and the reader is left to draw the conclusion. Huck has made a friend; the reader castigates the society which defines such a friendship as illegal and immoral. Huck never defeats his deformed conscience—it is we who do that—he simply ignores it in relation to Jim.

So go the moral adventures of Huckleberry Finn. They are so satisfying, so wholesome, so perfect, that they invite suspicion. Nevertheless, the book's morality is not a "sell," as James Cox suggests. It is not a subtle trap, a confidence game, designed for naive readers. The moral theme of Huckleberry Finn was created by Mark Twain at a time—1876 to 1883— when he was in full command of his talent; and it indicates precisely the way he understood his book ten years later. But we can make a distinction between Mark Twain's Huck Finn and ours, between the author's achievement in 1885 and the revisionist view that his later writings offer. Why didn't Mark Twain write another Huckleberry Finn? This question is not answered merely by assigning the book to the incomparable Everest reserved for Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, and Paradise Lost. The reason Mark Twain never wrote another Huckleberry Finn is that it became impossible for him to believe in his hero.