The Themes of Huck Finn

The Themes of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

An Interpretation

Mark Twain’s boyhood adventure story, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, has, for many generations, progressed in the minds of literary, historical, and sociological scholars from a simple children’s novel to a powerful window into the past. This book was able to introduce themes and subjects of incredible social importance in a way that is accessible for readers of every educational level. A few of the various themes addressed in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are: religion, superstition, and cultural morality, family and relations, and – perhaps most sweepingly of all themes – slavery and freedom. While many of the themes are not directly addressed or spoken about, especially slavery and race-relations, Twain uses the novel to present a very raw and personal view of each theme not only to bring context and depth to the characters, but also to help the reader evaluate the world that the novel reflects. Twain gives us a vision of the world as it is, and then gives us a world within a world – in the form of Jim and Huck’s adventure together – to show us how the world could be. Twain brilliantly uses Jim and Huck’s relationship as the means by which he introduces a fresh perspective for the other themes of his book, while simultaneously reinforcing the connectedness of humanity and the commonality of human existence.            

One of the first themes that any reader will immediately identify is that of religion, superstition and cultural morality. It is obvious from the first few pages of the book that Twain intends to skewer the prevalent religious ideology of his day in satire. The theme that becomes evident in passages dealing in religion is that, for the most part, it is more trouble than it is worth. Huck introduces his ideas of religion in the form of being taught Bible stories by Miss Watson, starting with Moses. Huck believes that learning about Moses wasn’t really of any practical kind of use because Moses was dead, and “bothering about Moses, which has no kin to her, and no use to anybody, being gone” while attempting to dissuade Huck from the bad etiquette of smoking is backwards in his mind (Norton, 109). Huck’s views about religion are pressed even further when he recalls that he isn’t interested in going to Heaven, “the good place”, if Tom Sawyer wasn’t going to be there and Miss Watson was (Norton, 109-110). There is, of course, a certain scandalous quality to this kind of presentation. It’s one thing to challenge the validity of learning about dead prophets, it’s quite another to say you’d rather go to Hell with a friend than go to Heaven with an overbearing tutor. In keeping with Huck’s apathetic attitudes about Christianity, he remarks that he finds the idea of prayer to be fruitless. If you could simply pray for something to happen that you wanted or needed then there should be no want or need in the world. “No, says I to myself, there ain’t nothing in it” (Norton, 115). In regards to Christian righteousness, Huck finds the injunction of the Widow that he should live charitably unfavorable and inconvenient because, as Huck put it, “I couldn’t see no advantage about it – except for the other people.” This passage, however, serves the reader with a double-meaning: while the text is, on the surface, insinuating that there is little good in being charitable in a religious sense, it also illustrates the point since Huck is the one reflecting on this notion and he is the beneficiary of religiously-motivated charity of the Widow (Norton, 115). Huck makes very clear that his impressions of the Biblical narratives he’d learned in Sunday school were markedly fictitious. Since Tom Sawyer’s fiction tales had a seemingly outlandish quality to them, Huck associated them with the equally mythical Bible stories (Norton, 117). Despite Huck’s internal contemplations and – mostly – rejections of the Bible stories he’s been told, he does argue with Jim over the greatness of King Solomon; though the reader can assume that it was simply because he wanted to be right in the argument, not necessarily because he actually believed it (Norton, 155).

The introduction of Jim on the Widow’s estate, however, establishes the first real indictment of western Christianity in the novel. Jim’s superstitious beliefs act as a direct contrast to the Christian religion of the “sivilized” world Huck had become acclimated to. On the one hand, Jim’s belief in witches and devils is influenced by Christian conceptions of the pagan and demonic, but they also serve as a contrast in terms of their practicality. Huck reckons that Christian doctrine, at least as he’s experienced it through Miss Watson and the Widow, is mostly impractical and useless. Jim’s brand of superstition had a certain kind of expediency to it: if one was scared of witches – and someone that didn’t know better probably would be – then one would scarcely want to be ridden “all over the world, and [tired most] to death” by one (Norton, 111-112). On the other hand the reader is, subtly, led to see the underlying contempt with which they are supposed to regard the legendary or mythical aspect of religious narratives. This whole witch-narrative of Jim’s starts because of a fairly harmless and innocuous prank played on Jim by Huck and Tom. The story started off as Jim saying he was put into a trance and rode “all over the State”, and then it grew into him being rode down to New Orleans. “And after that, every time he told it he spread it more and more, till by-and-by he said the rode him all over the world.” This is intended to illustrate a cautioning of religious legends that may have, in Twain’s estimation, evolved in the very same way (Norton, 111-112). But beyond the abstract pragmatism of Jim’s particular superstition, we see that Huck also finds a kind of deeply personal utility in it as evidenced by the divining nature of Jim’s “hairball.” In this scene we see that Huck is worried that his Pap would be coming back to upset the “new ways” that he was just starting to get used to so he went to Jim for guidance as a fortune-teller (Norton, 118). It is not difficult to see that Huck places a more significant degree of faith in the “hairball” than in praying to the Christian God since he is even willing to trade something nominally valuable for its powers of divination and even hopes to deceive it with fake money (Norton, 119). The irony of this particular scene should not be understated: the reader is supposed to see the humor of Huck wanted something with mystical powers of knowledge to not know that it is being deceived. It is clear that the reader should take away from this that superstition and mysticism are better than the institutional doctrine of religion (in terms of efficacy), but – in the end – are really all the same.

It is in this context of spirituality, however, that the heavy cultural and moral questions are introduced. Huck Finn is, amongst other things, undoubtedly famous for his “whoppers.” In nearly any society, the cultural mores and morals frown upon lies of any size or nature, but here the reader is intended to see lies as having a sort of redemptive quality to them when used in beneficent and noble purposes. Huck, paradoxically, employs a clever talent for lying in his aims to achieve clearly virtuous goals. He dresses up like a little girl and lies to “the woman” in order to find out how many people were looking for him and continues when he finds that they’re all looking for Jim (Norton, 141-142). He lies to the town watchman about his family being trapped on the Walter Scott in order to get Jim to shore without being noticed (Norton, 152). Perhaps most important among these whoppers is the lie he tells to the skiff-bound bounty hunters at Cairo about his family being sick in order to keep Jim from being caught, even though he has a substantial ethical crisis in the midst of that situation (Norton, 170). Huck later reflects that, while he feels bad for breaking the cultural taboo of helping a slave escape to freedom, he would feel even worse if he had betrayed Jim and concludes that there’s no use in “learning to do right, when it’s troublesome to do right [which he means by obeying the dominant social customs regarding slavery in the south] and ain’t no trouble to do wrong [by which he means to help Jim]” (Norton, 171). It is here that we see his whoppers being employed most nobly and where the true battle of ethics and morals would be waged. The reader of the late nineteenth century was, very much so, intended to reflect upon the redemptive nature of conscientious defiance of the social norms and Twain introduces those questions magnificently. In analyzing Huck’s ethical quandaries, Andrew Jay Hoffman builds on the argument of Arthur Berger by insisting that “Huck’s heroism is of a moral nature… his [ambivalence on moral questions] matters less than his ridicule of society on one hand and his moral awareness on the other. Being who he is, knowing what he knows, is Huck’s heroic action.” (Hoffman, 7) Huck’s moral dilemmas also lead him to endanger his own wellbeing, and potential comfort level on the journey, when he tells Mary Jane of the “rapscallions’” plot to defraud her and take her money. Moreover, in contrast to his cavalier attitude to his own wellbeing, Huck goes to great pains to protect Jim from being discovered and places himself at even greater danger for it (Norton, 231). Perhaps Huck’s most difficult struggles are with the heavy moral questions regarding his culture’s attitude on slavery. Those struggles, however, will be discussed later.            

Certainly one of the most provocative themes discussed in the novel is that of family and relations. From the very beginning of the tale we’re given a protagonist with a very unconventional family structure. Huck has no stable male figures in his life: the Widow is his guardian and provider, Miss Watson is his de facto educator, the local judge is his financial warden, and Pap is usually off in the wilderness or in towns behaving as a vagrant and a felon. Huck’s first stable male figure is brought in – rather scandalously for the time it was written in – as an uneducated, superstitious, dirt-poor, black slave. We immediately find that Huck’s conceptions of family are damaged by the unconventional setting in which he was reared and it was through Jim that Huck is introduced to a more traditional appreciation for the role of a father and husband when he observes Jim’s heartache over his family. Interestingly enough, Huck, in his own relationship with his father, could be seen as Pap’s slave: disallowed from further education, all wages and property were seized by his father, and it was perfectly acceptable for Huck to steal all of his “master’s” property and flee for freedom (Norton, 122-131). Elaine and Harry Mensh, on the contrast of uneducated Pap and educated free blacks, claim, “It is ironic that the most learned black man cannot vote in Missouri while a Pap can.” (Mensh, 71) To watch Huck’s progression in the novel is to observe a variety of different “families”, presented counter-intuitively to the reader for the purposes of challenging the traditional concepts of relationships and re-imagining the concepts of love. Certainly the intention in the novel is to show that the traditional family structure can be as unhealthy as the unconventional can be healthy and it is illustrated well in the novel. Huck began this story in a state of “freedom” under the careful eye of the Widow and Miss Watson almost in a sort-of “gradualistic” fashion, but was forcefully removed from his healthier living environment because of the social customs affording his father sole “guardianship” over him. This reflects a sort of devolution from a state of gradualism to a more paternalistic form of slavery under his father and “master” (Norton, 122). Huck was forced to work for Pap, in slave-like fashion, as Pap – depicted in a very stylized “antebellum slave master” manner – was off pursuing his own personal gratification vis-à-vis alcohol, vice, and causing legal mischief in order to acquire Huck’s fortune-in-trust with Judge Thatcher (Norton, 123). While Pap was out, attempting to secure his “rights”, Huck made a clean getaway to freedom. Not only did Huck get free from Pap, but also looted Pap’s supplies on the way out (Norton, 131). Scarcely can one imagine a reader of the late nineteenth century immediately drawing the parallel of young Huckleberry Finn to that of the antebellum slave, but rest assured that at least some did eventually.

Huck, not realizing the parallel of his own situation with Pap to that of Jim’s (and, especially of Jim’s family) with their masters, initially thinks very low of Jim when Jim, due to his excitement of thinking they had reached Cairo, began to celebrate his freedom and tell Huck about his plans to get his family free – either by buying their freedom or by having an Abolitionist “steal” them (Norton, 169). But later Huck observes that Jim is tortured by the fact that his family is languishing in slavery while he is living out his dream to become free. It’s obvious from this situation that Jim is very homesick for his wife and children, and Huck speculates that Jim “cared as much for his [family] as white folks does for their’n. It don’t seem natural, but I reckon it’s so.” This particular remark insinuates to the reader that Huck’s conceptions, not only of family in general, but also of the families of slaves are being challenged and reshaped by his experiences with Jim (Norton, 211). As Arthur Pettit remarks in his critical analysis of Twain, “Mark Twain & the South”, “The surest indication that this black man has finally been accepted as human is Huck’s willingness to accept his fallibility.” (Pettit, 113) The reader is left to wonder if perhaps these paradigm shifts on family are becoming more acceptable to Huck because of Jim’s assumption of the role as protector and caretaker in their relationship. This fact is illustrated best by Jim’s overwhelming concern for Huck in the course of events. The two are separated and reunited numerously and each time the scenes are painted very emotionally and tenderly. They stand in an obvious contrast to Huck’s interactions with his erratic and self-absorbed father. Carl Weik, in Refiguring Huck Finn, argues that the contrast between the “negative white” and good black is an intentional that there is “little question” that the color of skin is related to values and intentionally reversed. (Weik, 109) He furthers his point when he argues that Twain intended to show the “shocking reality of the situation [that] black can become ‘white’ and white ‘black.’” (Weik, 110) When the two chance upon each other on the island, Jim immediately takes charge for their wellbeing and makes a shelter in a cave and dinner – Huck remarks that their arrangement is very nice and Jim reminds Huck that he would be out in the rain without any food if it wasn’t for Jim’s initiative (Norton, 138). Jim says his heart was broken and he was apathetic to his own fate because he thought he’d lost Huck (Norton, 160). Jim silently tracked Huck all night by swimming in the river after the raft was hit by a steamboat. He then arranged for the raft to be brought ashore and Huck to be spirited back to him safely by the slaves on the Grangerford estate (Norton, 184). After the major feud engagement between the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords, Jim rescued Huck and got him away from the violence, grabbing him and hugging him as his own child (Norton, 187). There should be no doubt that Jim became the closest thing to a real father that Huck had ever had. Furthermore, the imagery is, in retrospect, very moving as the reader finds that Jim knew all along that Pap had died and that, now more than ever, Huck didn’t have anyone to take care of him (Norton, 139). Additionally, Jim withheld this information from Huck as a sort of protection for him until his safety and wellbeing was secured (Norton, 294).

While many themes are discussed in the novel, slavery is without a doubt the mortar by which all other themes are bound and, at the same time, it is a theme of its own. Jim is the main focal point of the theme of slavery in the novel and his interactions with Huck are the medium by which Huck expresses his views on the institution, but it is also the vehicle by which the reader can see Huck’s views challenged and forced into change over time. “Nigger Jim is the conscience of Huckleberry Finn… [Jim and Huck’s relationship] is the central theme of Huckleberry Finn and the most appealing dream of interracial brotherhood in our literature.” (Pettit, 109) Huck certainly brought his own prejudices and preconceptions of slaves to the relationship with him, yet their relationship flourishes in spite of these inlaid stereotypes. Huck, initially, regarded Jim as “so stuck up” because of his witch-fame which had, as Huck sees it, essentially ruined Jim as a servant (Norton, 112).  Huck believed – especially when he had been successfully out-argued – that “you can’t learn a nigger to argue” (Norton, 156) yet it also, at times, seemed to Huck that Jim had an “uncommon level head” for a slave (Norton, 154, 161), which would insinuate a growth in his estimation of Jim not as a “nigger” or a slave, but as a person. Jim also defied Huck’s preconception about the natural docility of slaves as he was stubbornly independent in his opinions and was not easily persuaded into believing what whites wanted him to (Norton, 155). Huck finds it hard to “humble [himself] to a nigger”, but was glad he did it afterwards and that he had mended his friendship with Jim (Norton, 160). Huck initially viewed Jim (like most slaves) in a utilitarian sense: as the butt of his jokes and the diviner of his fortunes. Yet when he finds out that Jim has run off, his personal oath to Jim overrides the legal, social, and culturally moral obligations and becomes his first decision to treat Jim as a person and not as a slave (Norton, 134). What’s interesting about this is that, perhaps in a subconscious way, Huck is already beginning to see Jim as an actual person: he makes an oath with Jim. An oath to a non-person would be no oath at all, so regardless of the fact that Jim was legally and socially a slave – and regardless of Huck’s preconditions about slaves, slavery, and abolition – Huck was beginning to regard Jim as a person. While Huck has no problem comprehending the place of slaves in the larger social context, he doesn’t consciously identify slaves as individuals that should be at his beckon call as the slave provided for him at the Grangerford estate had a “monstrous easy time, because I warn’t used to having anybody do anything for me” (Norton, 181).

The moral or ethical question of slavery is never directly addressed or dealt with in the novel until the very last scene on the Phelps’ farm, even though the issue itself is the primary theme of the novel itself. Outside of Jim, the only other slaves mentioned in the novel are very minor characters and are mentioned rather incidentally, the masses of slaves and slavery are not discussed at length. Huck refers to slaves as “niggers” and speaks of “niggers” as of lesser importance, unimportance or – generally – as separate in value from “people” (by which he means whites), but not in an outright spiteful way (Norton, 251). Huck even relates Jim’s nobility in sacrificing his freedom for Tom Sawyer’s life as being “white inside” (Norton, 284, emphasis added). Huck certainly reflects the cultural attitudes about slavery prevalent in his time when makes remarks about “abolitionists” with the utmost disdain (Norton, 134). To be an abolitionist – or worse, a “nigger stealer” – was to have no character, no intelligence, no education, no respectability, no pride and no shame as he remarks, with surprise, that Tom Sawyer would ever involve himself in such a venture (Norton, 258). Yet by the end of the novel, and through his relationship with Jim, Huck’s core cosmology is challenged – especially in regards to slavery – and the reader is able to take part in young Huck’s growth as a sort of subtly didactic attempt to repaint the canvass of race-relations in a more progressive and civilized way. Huck, over time, not only begins to see Jim as a person, just the same as him, but also as a dear friend and loved one.

Huck understands that slavery is part of the law and that to free a slave is legally, socially, and morally wrong in his culture – but his feelings about Jim lead him to break these taboos. Huck even believes (perhaps accurately) that he will be an outcast from his community if anyone ever finds out that he’s helped Jim escape from Ms. Watson and, thus, does not enlist the help of Tom Sawyer to have him freed (Norton, 245). Huck has several opportunities to turn Jim – the slave – over to the authorities as a runaway slave, but his crisis of conscience and loyalty to Jim – the person and friend – prevails (Norton, 169-170, 171-172). Drawing on his pragmatic view of religion, and in a very powerful passage of the novel, Huck decided that it would be better for him to “go to hell” than to give up Jim to Miss Watson, even if it was for the intention to free him from Phelps (Norton, 246). Huck’s culturally-endorsed view that Jim exists, like most slaves, for the enjoyment of whites is challenged throughout the novel, but most specifically when his pranks against Jim backfire and hurt their relationship such as the snakeskin prank (Norton, 140, 172) and the trash prank (Norton, 159-160). After Jim’s capture, Huck is horrified at the reality that Jim had been put into slavery “again all his life, and amongst strangers, too, for forty dirty dollars” (Norton, 245) and later decides once and for all, that he “couldn’t strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind.” He then resigned himself to the fact that he and Jim were in this together, for better or worse, and they had to stick with each other (Norton, 246). This advance reaches its final stage when Huck, abandoning all social taboos declared to himself that he “would take up wickedness again… and for starter, I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog” (Norton, 246-247). All of these passages reflect the growing directness with which the novel begins to address the issue of slavery and freedom, but none of them reach the fever pitch that Tom Sawyer – in the final scene at Phelps’ farm – ascends to as he rises “square up in bed, with his eye hot, and his nostrils opening and shutting like gills, and sings out to [Huck]: ‘They hain’t no right to shut him up! Shove! – and don’t you lose a minute. Turn him loose! he ain’t no slave; he’s as free as any cretur that walks this earth’” (Norton, 291, sic).

There is a certain temptation for easy dismissal of the importance of the theme of slavery in this novel since – by the time it was written – slavery had already been abolished in America. The reader, however, should not ignore the remaining prejudice of the Reconstruction Era along with the terrifying reality that the absolute rights of blacks in America had not yet been secured, legally or culturally. Many in the south continued to hope – and, frighteningly, some still do – that their cause and heritage would be reinvigorated at a later time: that slavery would resume and the south would secede again. In a sense, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was a persuasive vehicle by which each reader in the American public would begin to evaluate his or her own values in light of the novel, thus growing out of their initial preconceptions in the way that young Huck did. Likewise, one cannot escape the fact that Twain incorporated all of these deep and, in some ways, profoundly radical values into a childrens’ book, thus opening more impressionable minds to the vision of Huck and Jim, a vision of how the world could be.