To understand the romantic-realistic dilemma clearly, one needs to pick up an important thread in Chapter II, where Tom Sawyer convinces his gang that they are bold “highwaymen”—he wants to be in romantic style—and not common “burglars”(12.) In Chapter III, Tom who is influenced by the romantic novels he has read sees turnips as “julery”, hogs as ingots and a picnic as enemy warrior. While this is harmless fun, the realistic Huck argues with his own conscience: “So then I judged that all that stuff was only just one of Tom Sawyer’s lies I reckoned he believed in the A-rabs and the Elephants, but as for me I think different. It had all the marks of a Sunday-school”(14.)
This theme, made so much of in the first chapters, is reintroduced in Chapter XXXIII, just prior to the final episode. Here Huck learns that Tom will actively support him in a liberal cause—leading Jim to freedom. Huck does not know that Jim has already been made free by Miss Watson; only Tom Sawyer knows, and he withholds this information so that he can have another romantic adventure with Huck. The unsuspecting Huck reveals surprise at his conservative friend’s promise: “It was the most astonishing speech I ever heard—and I’m bound to say Tom Sawyer fell considerable in my estimation. Only I couldn’t believe it. Tom Sawyer a nigger-stealer”(226.)
In Chapter XXXIV, this theme is developed further. Reassured that Tom will become a “nigger-stealer,” Huck innocently sets up what could be termed the irony of anticipation; for Tom and the “folks at home” will lose character and Huck will gain more of it in the last chapters. Huck says:
“Well one thing was dead sure and that was that Tom Sawyer was in earnest, and was actuly going to help steal that nigger out of slavery. That was the thing that was too many for me. Here was a boy that was respectable and well brung up; and had had a character to lose; and folks at home that had characters; and he was bright and not leather-headed; and knowing and not ignorant; and not mean, but kind…”(234.)
Only because of a complete faith in Tom’s “serious” promise, Huck remains the lieutenant that he was in the first chapters of the story and helps his leader in tireless, extravagant preparations, reminiscent of Sir Walter Scott’s improbabilities in Ivanhoe, for Jim’s escape from prison. Among other things, they prepare a rope ladder, a journal, and a coat of arms. Still, one becomes aware of an important change in Huck’s attitude towards Tom.
For Chapter XXXIV, Huck is longer the lieutenant who blindly submits to his leader’s romantic schemes, which are not harmless ones now because Jim’s life is at stake. For every exaggerated plan Tom proposes in the final episode, Huck comes up with a practical one in such a way that the reader realizes that he is challenging Tom’s previously questioned authority. This is evident when Tom plans Jim’s first escape, First, Tom says: “ I wish there was a moat to this cabin, If we get time, the night of escape, we’ll dig one.” Huck replies: “What do we want of a moat when were going to snake out from under the cabin?” They continue on in this way as Huck reports the conversation:
“ ‘ No, it wouldn’t do—there ain’t necessity enough for it’
‘ For what ‘ I says
‘Why, to saw of Jim’s leg’ he says
‘Good Land!’ I says; ‘why, there ain’t not necessity for it. And what would you want to saw his leg off for, anyway?’
…’But there’s one thing—he can have a rope ladder…’
…’Why, Tom Sawyer, how you talk’ I says; ‘Jim ain’t got no use for a rope ladder”(240-241.)
In this scene, Huck clearly demonstrates the childlessness and impracticability of Tom’s romantic view and as a sharp contrast, the practicality of his realistic view. And though he momentarily says that Tom’s head is getting “leveler,” Huck openly criticizes the “authorities” (the romantic books of the past), which Tom has depended upon since Chapter II as his code of conduct:
“When I start to steal a nigger or watermelon, or a Sunday-school book, I ain’t no ways particular how it’s done so it’s done. What I want is my nigger; or what I want is my watermelon; or what I want is my Sunday-school book; and if pick’s the handiest thing, that’s the thing I’m a-going to dig that nigger or that watermelon or that Sunday-school book out with; and I don’t’ give a dead rat what the authorities think about it nuther”(247.)
This romantic-realistic quarrel is part of Mark Twain’s conscious plot against the real antagonist of the novel, Tom Sawyer. He returns at the end because, like Huck, he is a major character who needs to be set in a final position. The story has come a long way. It is not the child’s tale that it was in the beginning where Tom played the leader of the gang. Tom remains the child of the first chapters and try as he may, he cannot pass himself off as the hero in the last episode because he toys inhumanly with Jim. His life has been a continuous lie and it is this final harmful lue in a serious adult situation, after all, Tom himself is wounded when Jim does escape—that epitomizes his romantic nonsense.
Huck on the other hand, by involving himself in eh Sheperdson-Grangerford feud, by serving the whims of the treacherous Duke and Dauphin, by watching Colonel Sherburn kill a man, has developed before the last episode a sobere insight into a man’s inhumanity to man, into life as it is. He is no longer the prankster, who in an earlier chapter planted a dead rattlesnake next to Jim merely to amuse himself (52.) In the last episode, he is the educated, morally responsible person. Therefore, he is concerned when he learns that Tom plotted Jim’s escape to freedom only for the “adventure of it”(289.) Certainly Jim’s plight was not a game to the serious-minded Huck and though he does not openly condemn Tom for his romantic foolishness, he becomes the “innocent” ironist who imitates that Tom had a bad “bringing-up…so, sure enough, Tom Sawyer had gone and tool all that trouble and bother to se a free nigger free! And I couldn’t ever understand before, until that minute and that talk how he could help a body set a nigger free with his bringing up”(290.)
Even Tom’s society carries on a theme—man’s inhumanity to man—to its logical conclusion. The last working out of this theme occurred when the Duke and Dauphin tried to dupe the Wilks family of their money. In Chapter XLII, Huck listens to Tom’s adult world agree that Jim was “white” for having nursed the wounded Tom instead of escaping to freedom. Then one of these admirers suddenly speaks of Jim as something less than a human being:” I liked that nigger for that; I tell you, gentleman, a nigger like that is worth a thousand dollars—and kind treatment, too”(285.) Huck quickly observes the irony of the situation. He sees that these same adults, who treated Jim like a hero, “come out and locked him up”(286.) These hypocrites, Tom included, are more than partially responsible for Huck’s final decision to “light out for the territory,” to leave human civilization (293.)
The last episode has still another purpose. It resolves Huck’s greatest problem, the question of a slave’s humanity. Before this, Huck has not been fully convinced that he was justified in being an Abolitionist and that society was wrong in its attitude. In Chapter XVI, Huck reveals his uncertainty: “Give a nigger an inch and he’ll take an ell”(88.) IN Chapter XXXI, he decides to free Jim, yet he knows that he is wicked, a sinner in Tom’s society. He says: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell…”(214.) In the last episode he no longer feels evil because he is overwhelmed by Jim’s nobility. He listens eagerly as Jim explains why he stayed behind to nurse Tom when he could have escaped to freedom.
“’Well, den, dis is de way it look to me, Huck. Ef it wuz him that ‘uz bein’ sot free, en one er de boys wuz to git shot, would he say, “Go on en save me, nemmine ‘bout a doctor f’r to save dis one’? Is dat like Mars Tom Sawyer? Would he say dat? You bet he wouldn’t! Well, den, is Jim gwyne to say it?’”(275-76)
All that Huck can say to Jim’s reasoning is: “I knowed he was white inside…”
This entire episode, based on Tom’s lie, cannot be considered fatal because Huck settles conflicts presented earlier in the novel. Important themes, which are repeated and varied, furnish the key. It is only in the last chapters that Huck completely rejects both Tom’s romantic irresponsibility and society’s cruel nature. It is only here that he understands Jim’s true worth, after battling his conscience through many chapters. Finally, it is the honest and humble way in which he faces and then resolves each of the above mentioned conflicts that show Huck’s developing strength of character and it is that which makes him the hero to Twain’s novel, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
Works Cited
Young, Phillip
“Hemingway” New York 1952
Marx, Leo
“Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling and Huckleberry Finn” 1953
Van O’Connor, William
“Why Huckleberry Finn is Not the Great American Novel” Oct. 1955
Twain, Mark
“Life on the Mississippi” New York 1917
Twain, Mark
“Huckleberry Finn” 1983 1983
