-A Re-Reading of the Concluding Chapters
HUCKLEBERRY FINN FOR OUR TIME
By SPENCER BROWN
N THE introduction to The Portable
Mark Twain, speaking for almost all
responsible critics before and since,
Bernard DeVoto says of Huckleberry Finn,
"There is no greater book in American literature, but critics agree that the last quarter
of it is impaired by the extravaganza that
begins when Huck gets to Uncle Silas's
farm. It is typical of Mark Twain that he felt
no difference in kind or key between this
admittedly superb extravaganza and the
searching of American society and human
experience that precedes it. In fact, the delivery of Jim from the dungeon was one of
Mark Twain's favorite platform readings."
It is typical of critics to agree that Mark
Twain is a great unconscious force, a Mississippi rolling powerfully and beautifully to
the Gulf and then puttering around in a
Delta, not knowing what to do or how to
end a book-"Nothing More To Write"-a
foil'd circuitous wanderer, forgetting the
bright speed he had. A pathetic pictureBrother to the Oxus.
Let me offer a contrasting reading of the
novel and its conclusion as primarily an attack against slavery. Such an interpretation
of the novel as a whole, though not common, is not new. For example, Louis J.
Budd, in Mark Twain: Social Philosopher,
finds in Huckleberry Finn the influence of
George Washington Cable's fight for Negro
rights (Indiana University Press, 1962, p.
SPENCER BROWN, a Harvard man, an English
teacher and administrator at the Fieldston School
in New York City, has published articles and poems
in The New Yorker, Commentary, Poetry, Partisan
Review, Sports Illustrated, The Michigan Quarterly
Review, and elsewhere. One book of his poems, My
Father's Business, was published by Scribner's, and
another one is out looking for a publisher. He was a
Visting Professor of English at Colorado College
during the summers of 1964 and 1965.
93). "The reader who comes to it without a
thesis is keenly interested in the fate of its
runaway slave (p. 94).... In 1885 it unmistakably read as a commentary on the Southern question; to believe this was accidental
is to be naive (p. 106)." But I wish to suggest in addition that the last chapters are integral to the attack on slavery, are indeed its
envenomed point; and that furthermore they
are deliberate and sophisticated.
Let us review the alleged defects of the
last quarter of the novel, from "The Pitiful
Ending of Royalty" on. The swift and economical narrative becomes slow and repetitious. Mark Twain handles snakes and rats
and spiders fondly; he lingers on spoonstealing. He makes each humorous point
twice at least. The boys "let on" that picks
are case-knives; then they must "let on" that
the stairs are a lightning-rod. Jim can't
write, but in order to be "regular" he must
write notes. He must write them with spoons
on a grindstone. He must write them with
blood on a torn-up shirt. "Every time a rat
bit Jim, he would get up to write a line in
his journal whilst the ink was fresh." He
must write not only, "Here a captive heart
busted," but three other literary gems as
well.
We may laugh the first time; are we likely
to laugh the fourth? Evidently Mark Twain
thinks so, for in these ten chapters he
sacrifices everything for hokum. He loses the
silent, strong, symbolic power of the great
river flowing through his novel-for we are
off the river now, stranded. He loses the devastatingly honest, observant character of
Huck and gains instead a mere puppet in the
hands of Tom Sawyer. Huck becomes a cipher with a picturesque style. And above all,
Jim: Jim's human kindness, his dignity, his
good sense, his humor, all vanish; and he
41
0
