Note: This brief synopsis is my first attempt at following the suggestion of Mr. Mortimer Adler in his book entitled How to Read a Book. I outline Huckleberry Finn, give a brief summary, tell my thoughts on the work and jump into Adler's fourth stage of "owning a book" - offering a thematic comparison with another work of similar subject matter. For this I have chosen Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910)
This is a story about a boy who escapes his abusive father by rafting down the Mississippi River. It chronicles his adventures with a runaway slave he meets along the way, and concludes with an account of how he and his friend liberate the slave who, as it happens to be, was already free anyway due to the will of his owner.
Brief Outline
Pre-journey
a. Tom and Huck’s adventures
b. Huck’s father returns to claim him
c. Huck escapes
Journey
d. Huck meets Jim
e. The feuding families – Grangerfords & Shepherdsons
f. The “king” and the “duke”
Post-journey
g. Huck meets Tom’s Aunt Sally who mistakes him for Tom and whose family captures Jim
h. Tom arrives. Huck and Tom free Jim
i. Aunt Polly arrives and all is resolved
Summary
Huckleberry Finn uses the river adventures of a boy and a slave in a clever and amusing way to explore the morality and conscience of society during the time of slavery in the United States. In the character of Tom Sawyer we find a boy whose interests lie purely in having adventures “as they are found in books.” This is sometimes even to the detriment of his companions, as in the case of freeing Jim. Tom is interested much more in the adventure of the escape than in liberating Jim, as Huck desires.
In Huck we find a boy also keen on adventure but with a moral conscience whose progressive development seems to be mirrored in his journey down the river. It is an unformed conscience, however, and one may suggest its duality is indicative of the conflicted conscience of American society during its dark period of slavery. What Huck thinks is right is what the law of society is telling him is right: slaves belong to their owners. But he ultimately follows his heart which tells him that Jim is his dear friend and ought not be enslaved.
The more I studied about this the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling. I was stealing a poor old woman’s nigger that hadn’t ever done me no harm…Well, I tried the best I could to kinder soften it up somehow for myself by saying I was brung up wicked, and so I wasn’t so much to blame, but something inside of me kept saying, “There was the Sunday school, you could ‘a’ gone to it [and learned]”…So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they? It was no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn’t come…I was playing double…I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and write to that nigger’s owner; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie – I found that out. (from the chapter entitled, ”You can’t pray a lie”)
Huck discovers he just can’t “harden himself” against Jim to turn him in and so concludes he’ll just “go to hell and take up wickedness again” by keeping his friend liberated. Huck’s moral tension seems to be between his head and his heart. He knows what is right – what the law says – but can’t bring himself to do it.
Juxtapose Huck with the duality found in another character from a very famous novel written about slavery: Mr. St. Clare from the book “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Mr. St. Clare is significantly more refined and intelligent. He knows there is no moral basis for slavery, yet he is a slave owner himself. Still, he can’t bring himself to believe that slaves in large part would be better off on their own. In this (if I am recalling the story correctly) he is no doubt engaging in that complacent self-deception that seemed so common among southern slave owners of the period. Mr. St. Clare has his moral awakenings too, however, and these are due to the sensitive, nearly perfect, moral sensibilities of his angelic daughter who suffers an untimely early death. But Mr. St. Clare arrives himself at this enlightening only just before his death. In Huck, the winding and widening river journey mirrors his own moral development. In Mr. St. Clare, the blossoming of his daughter’s personality and moral fortitude are the instrument by which he awakens.
I enjoyed Huckleberry Finn very much both for the message and for the medium. A long lazy float trip down the Mississippi seems to be the perfect venue for the studied contemplation of the nature and origin of the moral tensions in society at the time of slavery. The adventures bring us face to face with so many degraded people that we may wonder at its exaggeration. But the exaggeration itself serves as a backdrop for the poignant question which seems to be lurking in the shadows throughout the tale: how is it again that we can be tolerating slavery?
I think it is a very effective novel for the reasons stated. Twain makes excellent use of period accents, culture and custom to weave his “ingenious attack on society” (from the dust jacket) through the telling of a tale that many can relate to on the level of, if nothing else, childhood dreams.
Addendum
I’d like to discover the reasons why Huckleberry Finn are on virtually all the lists of “Great Books of Western Civilization” while Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not. Surely Uncle Tom’s Cabin was profoundly more influential. Indeed, Abraham Lincoln credited Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book as the single greatest influence on emancipation. Perhaps it is because Huckleberry Finn seems to operate on diverse, multiple levels. Or perhaps Uncle Tom’s Cabin is still too heated politically.