Huck Finn vs Tom Sawyer: survival vs adventure

The following is a excerpt from a scholarly analysis for Twain's work.

Two Boys: Versions of Childhood in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

By H. Daniel Peck


      These differences between the two boys suggest how the books Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, despite their similar titles, dramatize very different kinds of “adventures.” Tom’s adventures are often the products of his own rich imagination. Huck’s adventures, on the other hand, involve a series of evasions from the real-life dangers of a pervasively violent culture, vividly dramatized, for example, by the bloody and fatal Grangerford-Shepherdson feud. There is no scene in Tom Sawyer remotely like the one in Huck Finn where Huck’s friend Buck Grangerford dies: “When I got down out of the tree I crept along down the river bank a piece, and found the two bodies laying in the edge of the water, and tugged at them till I got them ashore; then I covered up their faces, and got away as quick as I could. I cried a little when I was covering up Buck’s face, for he was mighty good to me.”25
Recent scholarship has determined that Twain set his manuscript aside, in August or September of 1876, just at the point that Huck asked Buck what a feud is.26 Earlier, it had been believed that the subsequent long hiatus in the composition of the novel began when the raft is smashed by a steamboat, and this understanding led to a theory, proposed by numerous literary critics over the years, that Twain had in effect smashed the novel in frustration. That is, he realized that there was no way that he could reconcile the book’s humor—some of the richest in American literature—with the potentially tragic implications of its narrative development. In this view, once Twain had determined that Huck and Jim, lost in the fog, would miss their turnoff up the Ohio River, at Cairo, Illinois, toward a free state, he found himself committed to a story that, barring utterly implausible plot developments, could not end happily.
Ascertaining that Twain actually set his manuscript aside later in the story than the steamboat crash modifies this view, though, as we will see, it does not fully reconcile the issues that earlier critics raised. It is true, nevertheless, that Twain had several other projects competing with his composition of Huck Finn in the 1870s, and other practical reasons too can be found for his abandoning his manuscript in the late summer of 1876. When Twain resumed work on the book in 1880, he completed the Grangerford-Shepherdson episode with the death of Buck in what was to become chapter eighteen, and at the very end of that chapter reunited Huck and Jim and their raft (all of them separated from one another by the steamboat crash), carrying them further downriver in what, by then, had become an alternating pattern of raft scenes and scenes set on the shore. The symbolic interplay of raft and shore is best expressed by Huck himself, as he and Jim, leaving the scene of the deadly feud, “shove off for the big water”27:

I never felt easy till the raft was two mile below there and out in the middle of the Mississippi. Then we hung up our signal lantern, and judged that we was free and safe once more. . . . I was powerful glad to get away from the feuds, and so was Jim to get away from the swamp. We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel might free and easy and comfortable on a raft.28

The novel’s contrapuntal movement between the river, associated with freedom and beauty, and the shore, characterized by corruption and violence, carries Huck and Jim farther southward into a new series of “adventures.” These further adventures are dominated by two confidence men, the Duke and the King, who commandeer the raft and whose exploits and schemes reveal the gullibility of people living along the shore. It is in this section of the novel that Twain momentarily allows Huck’s first-person narration to slip, when the author’s anger toward antebellum southern culture boils over into Colonel Sherburn’s speech to the mob: “Your newspapers call you a brave people, so much that you think you are braver than any other people—whereas you’re just as brave, and no braver. Why don’t your juries hang murderers? Because they’re afraid the man’s friends will shoot them in the back, in the dark—and it’s just what they would do.”29
For the most part, however, Twain sustains Huck’s voice in this section of the novel, centrally for the purpose of dramatizing Huck’s growing awareness of Jim’s full humanity. One key scene in which we witness this process is in chapter 23, when Huck awakens to find Jim looking forlorn, “his head down betwixt his knees, moaning and mourning to himself”; “[h]e was thinking about his wife and his children, away up yonder, and he was low and homesick; because he hadn’t ever been away from home before in his life; and I do believe he cared as much for his people as white folks does for their’n. It don’t seem natural, but I reckon it’s so.”30
This movement of Huck Finn concludes with the Duke and the King selling Jim back into slavery (for forty dollars) on the Phelps plantation, which becomes the setting of the novel’s final ten chapters. Here arrives possibly the book’s greatest moment, when Huck, whose conscience has been socialized by a racist society, faces a terrible choice—whether or not to try to free Jim from captivity. He resolves the crisis by writing a letter to Miss Watson, telling her where to find her runaway slave:

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray, now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking; thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time, in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, stead of calling me—so I could go on sleeping; and see him how he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around, and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.”31

This passage dramatizes one of the great turning points in American fiction. Yet, Twain provides nowhere to turn. His naïve child-narrator has no awareness of the integrity of his decision, and no way of transcending his childhood to obtain some kind of moral hold on the decision. The only person in the novel with the wisdom and experience to guide Huck to awareness is Jim, who is absent from the scene, and who, in any case, is about to have his stature greatly diminished by the author. This diminishment is occasioned, in the very next chapter, by the surprise return of Tom Sawyer.
The final ten chapters of Huck Finn are dominated by Tom, and by the ornate scheme—based on The Count of Monte Cristo—he devises to free Jim from captivity. Tom alone knows that Jim already has been freed, by Miss Watson on her deathbed (exactly the kind of implausible plot development that the novel now required if tragedy were to be averted), and that everything has become a game, a game bookending Tom’s game of robbers with which the book began. Jim, so fully humanized in earlier parts of Huck Finn, here becomes the object of humor (readers clearly are meant to laugh at him rather than with him now), a brand of humor derived from minstrel shows.
Generations of critics and scholars have found the ending of Huck Finn disappointing, and I think there is no good answer to their objections. It’s true that in this closing section of the novel Twain manages, in isolated passages, to attack through sharp irony the violent racism of the antebellum south. In one such episode, Aunt Sally, on the Phelps plantation, responds to one of Huck’s inventive lies, asking him about a steamboat accident:

“Good gracious! Anybody hurt?”

“No’m. Killed a nigger.”

“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”32

There is no question, however, that in this final section of the novel Twain lost the beautifully integrated mixture of lyricism, moral seriousness, and humor that had sustained its great odyssey. Perhaps this loss was inevitable, as the river that had structured and supported this odyssey ran its course, running aground, as it were, at the Phelps plantation. Hemingway felt that everything past this point in the novel is “cheating,” and endless commentary in our time has debated what Twain should have done with his conclusion; some have even rewritten the ending for him.33