The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain – America Goes to School
Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, first published in 1884, tells the story of a young Missouri boy growing up in the 1830s. With no mother and a drunken, abusive father, Huck is on the cusp of feral child and school boy. Maybe he is a bit like his country, which is moving out of its frontier phase into a more settled existence. This ambivalent position underlies the conundrums of the book. Huck’s guardian Widow Douglas tries to ‘sivilise’ Huck by sending him to school, which can feel restrictive and false compared to Huck’s freewheeling former life spent out in the woods. On the other hand Huck’s father Pap, a drunk, coarse, and violent man, hardly suggests the virtues of a simple life close to the land. Then there’s the presentation of books and learning. Books might be the guiding light of Huck’s friend Tom Sawyer, but they appear to be as misleading as they are illuminating. For Tom, if it’s in a book it must be true, an idea that leads to all kinds of nonsense as the boy tries to apply the stuff he has read in books to real life. Finally, there’s conceptions of justice, which might be the complex business of law embodied in the upstanding character of Judge Thatcher; or the ‘natural law’ of an individual’s conscience. Here things get murky as we see Huck’s ‘conscience’ manipulated by a kind of social indoctrination. The young boy has always seen slaves as possessions. Huck does end up helping a slave find his freedom, but he feels his actions in doing this are the result of personal weakness rather than the dictates of his conscience.
The book is written in an apparently plain, homespun, but carefully constructed vernacular style – Huck’s narration falling somewhere between wild and civilised. The story is, in many ways farcical, the bigger picture saved from silliness by the sense that the plot’s crazy twists and turns, often cooked up by Tom Sawyer from his reading, represent the uncomfortable meeting of books and reality. I sometimes found the knockabout business rather hard work to get through, but there were always interesting ideas bubbling around beneath the surface.
Overall The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a deserved classic, and an interesting road marker on the road of America’s development as a country.
