The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
- Mark Twain

Whenever I'm asked about my favorite quote, the answer I almost always give is that little gem. It's a simple quote yet there's a lot of information to chew on in there. I really enjoy it because sometimes I let my schoolwork run my life, which is stressful.

School? Nah son.

Alright. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Pretty chill book, yeah? I thought so. Here's why:

Over the past week and a half I've been reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in small increments and my overall experience with the book has been a mixed bag. There's a lot of duality in my reaction to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. While I really enjoyed some particularly thought-provoking quotes from the book that I still haven't fully finished reflecting on, I didn't care for the fact that by the end of the book the events that took place were all for naught.

I think Huck Finn as a character is fantastic. He's a humorous character with an enjoyable personality. I felt sympathy for Huck pretty much from the get go, in part due to his victimization as a result of Pap's alcoholism. Huck is the vehicle for some of my favorite quotes from the book. In class we touched on Huck's statement "I don't take no stock in dead people." I still haven't actually finished contemplating that notion yet. It was mentioned in class that by adopting this approach to life, Huck has drastically limited his capacity for knowledge; Huck has made the entire wealth of human knowledge over the course of history unattainable. When you couple his outlook on the past with the way he views humanity in the present, Huck becomes a very sad and isolated character. In his adventures, Huck encounters robbers, con artists, racists, and angry mobs which all serve to disillusion him. He learns that the world is not a nice place and at times is sickened by humanity.

Another of Huck's quotes that have really stuck with me is "All right, then, I'll go to hell." That moment in the book is really powerful because in a book filled with several incidents of racism, it's moving to see tolerance prevail. Additionally, the quote is sort of a turning point in Huck's character arc. It's at this point that Huck finally decides to forego the societal and conventional norms that held him down. Previously, Huck was victim to fact that he was "bad" and acted poorly simply because people thought he was indeed "bad". It was a gratifying moment in the novel to see Huck act due to his own conscience instead of society's view of morality.

However, while this moment in the book is an enjoyable one, I feel like Twain goes out of his way to negate the impact of this event (and many others in the book) making it inconsequential. For example, Huck continually struggles with the moral ambiguity present in freeing a slave; while slaves are living, breathing, thinking people with thoughts and feelings they are also someone's property. Similarly, while Huck changed and learned a lot about himself through his travels I feel like Twain undoes much of Huck's character development in the last couple chapters of the book. Towards the end of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer comes back into play and takes over the whole show. Once Tom Sawyer returns to Huck's life, his actions become trivial and boyish once again.

In my Survey of Theatre class we recently learned about the origin, meaning, and implementation of deus ex machina. Although the term originated from Greek theatre, Twain could have fooled me into thinking he invented the damn thing. What is that you say? Miss Watson had actually freed Jim the whole time? Seems legit. The way in which Twain concludes The Adventures of Huckleberyy Finn, a novel that is in some part about the search for freedom, and finally grants Jim his independence significantly reduces the impact of the whole novel. It's convenience for convenience sake.

When reading Huck Finn, I always anticipated the next aspect of society that Mark Twain would satirize. The Grangerfords and Shepherdsons attending a church and listening to a sermon about brotherly love with guns between their knees is a particularly biting image that comes to mind. I also really loved Tom Sawyer's early appearances in the novel - specifically the formation of Tom Sawyer's Gang. I couldn't exactly figure out who or what was the victim of Twain's satire, but I found the gang's sensational approach to piracy combined with their unwillingness to commit to anything very humorous nonetheless.

EMERGENCY CUTENESS BELOW