Introduction to Huck Finn

In his 1950 introduction to Huckleberry Finn (1884), T. S. Eliot highlights two elements which, in his opinion, formed a great book the only masterpiece of Mark Twain, as he calls the book. As he believes, these the two critical pieces of Huck Finn are “The Boy and The River.” It is the River that, according to Eliot “controls the voyage of Huck and Jim; that will not let them land at Cairo, where Jim could have reached freedom; it is the River that separates them and deposits Huck for a time in the Grangerford household; the River that re-unites them, and then compels upon them the unwelcome company of the King and the Duke. Recurrently, we are reminded of its presence and its power.”

Eliot also provides a striking explanation for Mark Twain’s reversion to “the mood of Tom Sawyer” in the novel’s final chapters. He explains that neither a tragic nor a happy ending would be appropriate, Because Huck Finn must come from nowhere and be bound for nowhere. For Eliot, Huck is a proto modernist, a nomadic “vagabond” shorn of personal history and local traits, belonging to no particular place and inhabiting a time that “has no beginning and no end.”  

Eliot  argues that it is right Huck does give way to Tom. The style of the book comes from Huck and the river provides form: we understand the river by seeing it through Huck, who is himself also the spirit of the river and like a river, Huckleberry Finn has no beginning or end. Therefore, Huck, logically, has no beginning or end: as such he “can only disappear” in a “cloud of whimsicalities”. For Eliot this is the only way that the book can end. However, Eliot relies on the fact that the River, Huck and Jim are symbolic, that they are allegorical. This suggests that the later chapters of the book are Romantic in style. The entire book must be considered in the context of the ending (however much it may disappoint), it is more a Romance; and to say that Twain is “nothing more and nothing less than a Realist” is thus incorrect. Eliot’s interpretation, when considered in this context, asserts that Twain was not in fact writing as a Realist exclusively or, arguably, at all.

Jane Smiley’s analysis gives a very controversial view on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn due to its subdued thoughts upon what is known to many as classical American literature.  Throughout her piece, Jane Smiley’s underlying purpose remains to criticize Twain in his writing of Huckleberry Finn. She carries a skeptical and disapproving tone throughout her essay. Her first argument is that the last twelve chapters of the book was a complete “failure”. She supports this with the fact that the novel strayed from its central focus: the relationship between Huck and Jim. She also argues that the novel had a weak beginning as well as a weak ending and that the author did not really know the actual meaning of racism, and due to this, the novel had no deep meaning. Lastly, her essay concerns other author’s inspections about the issues upon slavery, and how differently they are represented in other works of literature. 

Smiley makes her point known that although Huck Finn is what most view as a great novel; she disagrees and states that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin  should be considered a greater novel than Huckleberry Finn because it carries better propaganda and holds better messages of racism.  From the beginning to the end of the essay, Smiley’s initial intention to bring Mark Twain’s novel into to spot light changes.  Her essay that was supposed to support Mark Twain moves more interest upon Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and seems to have replaced the luster of Huck Finn completely. She thinks that the character Jim, the runaway slave also Huck’s companion in all of their misadventures was treated so poorly that the the novel as a whole doesn’t stand as an attack on racism at all. Perhaps, she must of read a different book than I, because I totally don’t agree with her. I wish she would have given examples on how Huck’s actions should have played out towards Jim that would make her feel like the novel did suffice. The fact that Huck had several opportunities to turn Jim in and didn’t, is a wonderful action in itself. Although Huck did at one point feel guilt for harboring “stolen property,” he also was a mere thirteen years old at the time and had grown up in the Southern America pre-Civil War.

I can understand how living in this area during the development of who he is may influence his thoughts because that’s all he has ever known: Whites oppressing the Black’s. I’m not trying to say this is an excuse for thinking it’s okay to look at Jim as property, I’m saying it’s his thoughts based off the only thing he’s ever witnessed. In the end, Huck describes Jim as being “white on the inside,” which to me it translated that he sees Jim is a human just like himself, nothing less, maybe even more than him. I could imagine Huck as an adolescent looking up to Jim in a Fatherly way, due to the fact his Father was an abusive drunk, and he’s a kid, he must feel love for Jim as if he were family after all this time adventuring together.

In "Huck, Jim, and American Racial Discourse" David L. Smith describes racism in America beginning with the words of Thomas Jefferson. He presents race as a social construct that is used to denote superiority of one group in society over another, and shows how this defines both attitudes and language. Smith writes "Most obviously, Twain uses 'nigger' throughout the book as a synonym for 'slave'" and shows how this word has misled some modern readers to charge Twain's novel with racism. Modern readers would be wise to remember that Twain was not merely using this word to be authentic, nor to shock or offend, but instead to "demystify" the concept of race, to present an American civilization where "real individual freedom, in this land of the free, cannot be found." Smith asserts that “Twain adopts a strategy of subversion in his attack on race” by focusing “on a number of commonplaces associated with ‘the Negro’ and then systematically dramatizing their inadequacy.” The result, Smith states is a book almost “without peer among major Euro-American novels for its explicitly antiracist stance.”

In his essay, David L. Smith is an apologist for Mark Twain, defending and even praising The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He particularly highlights and appreciates the subtle jabs at antebellum society that Twain delivers in his depiction of the “negro” Jim. The persona of the speaker is clearly the author himself, stating his own defense of Twain’s work. The speaker comes from a modern viewpoint, 1984, yet considers, in his argument, the “overwhelming and optimistic consensus” that reigned in 1884. He defends and speaks for not only Twain but also “Melville, J. W. DeForest, and George Washington Carver,” all other writers who did not conform to the standard portrayal of blacks as the unintelligent, insensitive, inconsiderate individuals Jefferson painted them to be.