The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Jim’s character is nearly always at the forefront in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and his motivations toward freedom and his fractured family drive the plot forward. Mark Twain wrote him as part of a cast of colorful archetypes in service to a set of complex moral parables. As such, Jim’s occasional gullibility and lack of foresight is not significantly greater than that of other people we meet along the river, including Huck himself. In fact, Jim proves to be more resourceful, clever, and level-headed than most, which was rare of Black characters in 19th-century American fiction. Nevertheless, the controversy that has met The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for most of the last 100 years centers around Jim and the other Black characters depicted in the novel. This controversy is well founded.

Huck’s pragmatic malleability of character was a difficult trick for Twain to write while still maintaining the reader’s sympathy. It may have come across as moral turpitude or stupidity, if not for the inside access we are granted to Huck’s reasoning and wit. By this light, we are not given access to Jim’s thoughts except as they are filtered through Huck’s character, and we are left to wonder what Jim is thinking as he whiles away whole days on a raft with his face painted blue, or in an unguarded prison awaiting transport further south, all while waiting to continue his existentially important journey for freedom and family. It is possible that modern White readers may miss the context for Jim’s nearly self-annihilating passivity in these instances, but anyone touched by slavery or its historical legacy cannot. Jim is incompletely written by Twain, but it is possible that we notice this only because of the passages in which Jim’s humanity is carefully illustrated by Twain and presented with care and affection.

Tom Sawyer plays a strange role in Huck’s story. Huck and Jim are led along by events in the plot, often at the risk of their lives. Tom, by contrast, seems wholly unaffected by what he sees and hears (near the end of the story he delights in having been shot in the leg), and appears in the plot almost as if by magic. Furthermore, when Tom’s around, Huck seems to lose all his agency, choosing instead to defer to Tom’s broader experience (particularly when it comes to the reading of romantic adventure fiction) and to Tom’s “bringing up” in terms of greater wealth, education, and security. In a novel full of surprises and sudden plot turns, Tom’s presence is both the least expected and the most predictable.

The so-called king of France and the duke of Bridgewater are a pair of con-men who wage a disturbingly destructive campaign across the river. They are cut from the same cloth as Huck’s father, yet where pap fails, the two scoundrels show themselves capable of incredible and terrible success. This is owed to their charisma; they know enough about human nature and need to form carefully constructed personae to meet and profit from those needs, which are as diverse as the people they encounter. Thus, they know that a backwoods congregation needs to hear stories about redemption, that a duped audience needs to heal its pride by ensuring other people are equally duped, and that a family grieving for a patriarch is inclined to need family.

Of the models of adulthood presented before Huck, the king and the duke represent his most perilous path. Like Huck, they have just enough book learning to print false notes, and just enough empathy for human nature to emulate it. These scoundrels represent the limits to Huck’s pragmatic moral floundering and the result of entering into and passing through the best years of one’s adult life floating downriver on figurative and literal rafts.