Bloom’s GUIDES Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn CURRENTLY AVAILABLE 1984 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn All the Pretty Horses Beloved Brave New World The Chosen The Crucible Cry, the Beloved Country Death of a Salesman The Grapes of Wrath Great Expectations Hamlet The Handmaid’s Tale The House on Mango Street I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings The Iliad Lord of the Flies Macbeth Maggie: A Girl of the Streets The Member of the Wedding Pride and Prejudice Ragtime Romeo and Juliet The Scarlet Letter Snow Falling on Cedars A Streetcar Named Desire TheThings They Carried To Kill a Mockingbird Bloom’s GUIDES Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Edited & with an Introduction by Harold Bloom © 2005 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of Haights Cross Communications. www.chelseahouse.com Contributing editor: Janyce Marson Cover design by Takeshi Takahashi Layout by EJB Publishing Services Introduction © 2005 by Harold Bloom. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher. Printed and bound in the United States of America. First Printing 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The adventures of Huckleberry Finn / [edited by] Harold Bloom. p. cm. — (Bloom’s guides) Includes bibliographical references (p. ). ISBN 0-7910-8241-5 (alk. paper) 1. Twain, Mark, 1835-1910. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 2. Finn, Huckleberry (Fictitious character) 3. Mississippi River—In literature. 4. Boys in literature. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Series. PS1305.A34 2005 813’.4—dc22 2005003089 Every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyrighted material and secure copyright permission. Articles appearing in this volume generally appear much as they did in their original publication with little to no editorial changes. Those interested in locating the original source will find bibliographic information in the bibliography and acknowledgments sections of this volume. Contents Introduction 7 Biographical Sketch 10 The Story Behind the Story 15 List of Characters 20 Summary and Analysis 23 Critical Views 46 David E.E. Sloane on the Development of a “Raft Ethic” 46 Louis J. Budd on Historical Relevance 49 Michael Egan on Huck’s Language Conventions 52 William R. Everdell on the Autobiographical Mode of Narration 55 Victor A. Doyno on Huck’s Disillusionment with the Judeo-Christian Tradition 60 Everett Emerson on the Complexity of Huck’s Character 65 George C. Carrington, Jr. on the Unity of Huckleberry Finn 68 Leland Krauth on the Convergence of Southwestern Humor and Sentimentality 71 Richard Poirier on Games and Trickery as Self-Expression 75 Shelley Fisher Fishkin on the Significance of Silence and Quiescence 78 Lyall Powers on Huck as the Embodiment of Emersonian Independence 82 John E. Becker on the Work as a Serious Novel Addressing Critical Social Issues 86 Works by Mark Twain 91 Annotated Bibliography 92 Contributors 100 Acknowledgments 103 Index 105 Introduction HAROLD BLOOM For a country obsessed with the image of freedom, Huck Finn is an inevitable hero, since he incarnates the genius of American solitude. Richard Poirier observes that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is marked by the quietness of its autobiographical narrator. Huck talks to us, the readers, but only rarely to the other figures in the book, even to his companion, Jim. Loneliness is the condition of Huck’s existence; he belongs neither to the adult world, nor to that world’s antechamber in Tom Sawyer’s gang. Truly, Huck is as isolated and eccentric a figure as “Walt Whitman,” the hero of Song of Myself, and Mark Twain, as Poirier remarks, never found a fit context for Huck after the first sixteen chapters of Adventures. Partly, this may mean that Huck is larger and more vital than his book, admirable as it is. But I suspect that ultimately Huck stands for what is least sociable in Mark Twain, whose discomfort with American culture was profound. Like Huck. Twain had decided to go to hell, if that was the only way to escape his neighbors and country, and if that was the only path to freedom. Since Huck is neither a god nor a beast, he suffers intensely from his loneliness. If you define freedom as a relationship within society, then Huck is a negative image only: the hero as misfit. Classic American literature, however, does not easily permit societal definitions of freedom. Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, Ishmael in Moby-Dick, Thoreau at Walden Pond, Emerson confronting the past: all provide images of isolation as an inner freedom, and the exiles of Henry James have a way of reestablishing their American solitude in centers of sociability like London and Rome. Whitman proclaims the love of brothers while finding his particular metaphor for poetic creativity in Onanism, and Emily Dickinson’s self- segregation is notorious. The tradition does not vary that much 7 in the great writers of our century, where our poets remain lonely: Robert Frost. Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery. One thinks of the protagonists of our major novelists: Dreiser’s Carrie, Cather’s Ántonia, Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, Faulkner’s Joe Christmas: these also are isolated dreamers. The American religion of self-reliance carries with it the burden that no American feels wholly free until she is truly alone. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner all exalted Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, seeing in it their American starting point. Their tributes were rather fierce: Fitzgerald said that Huck’s “eyes were the first eyes that ever looked at us objectively that were not eyes from overseas,” while Hemingway placed the book first among all our books, and Faulkner’s final novel, The Reivers, explicitly presents itself as a revision of Twain’s masterpiece. What disconcerts many critics of Huckleberry Finn—the slippage between Huck as narrator, lying his way to a kind of freedom, and Huck as active character, ultimately manifesting a generosity of spirit beyond everyone else in the book except Jim—seems not to have bothered Twain’s novelist descendants. Twain gave them a fascinating fourteen-year-old quasi-scoundrel in Huck, a trickster as resourceful as Homer’s Odysseus or the biblical Jacob. Though Huck may look like an unvarying picaresque hero, he actually is a master of disguises, and he changes incessantly, while growing no older. He is very hard to characterize because he is not still long enough for us to know exactly who he is. Nor is his own sense of identity securely established: he both is and is not his dreadful father’s son. Huck’s central freedom is essentially authentic: he always will be fourteen years old, because we cannot envision him, say, at forty. Lighting out for the territory will not age him; whether his morally ambiguous attitude toward society could survive maturation is therefore an inappropriate question. That may be why Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ends in a fashion unsatisfactory to nearly every critical reader the book has attracted. We all want Huck to be better and stronger, and even more self-reliant than he is. He has broken with the morality of 8 slaveholding, but the break has ravaged and confused him. We cannot have a politically correct Huck, which is why the book continues to offend so many, who simply do not know enough nineteenth-century American history to see that—for his time, in his place—Huck is a miracle of self-emancipation. Yet he is not only pursued by the murderous Pap Finn; he also carries much of his father within him, as Harold Beaver has shown. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has only a few rivals as the indispensable work of nineteenth-century American literature: Moby-Dick, Leaves of Grass, The Scarlet Letter are among them. Ahab, “Walt Whitman,” Hester Prynne all inform our sense of ourselves, but it is primarily in Huck Finn that we study our nostalgias. 9