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View Huck through Franklin's lens, to highlight Twain's' irony in giving Huck all the capacities to achieve success except the ambition to grow wealthy In keeping with the tradition of the picaresque novel, the main character, in this case, Huck, is a kindhearted person who is a misfit in polite society and who, in most of his episodic encounters with people, is in some kind of trouble, or out of sympathy with the people who seem to control events. Although St. Petersburg is the idyllic setting from which Huck is awakened in his initiation, his childhood has scarcely been an idyllic one, nor has he lived the life of a typical carefree boy. When we look at the character Huck Finn, Twain's irony is obvious - Huck has all the capacities to achieve success except the ambition to grow wealthy.
From the first, before his adventures get under way, his outcast state is seen in his having experienced more of the ugliness of life than other children, like Tom Sawyer, have known. He has no supportive family and none of the softening, nurturing influence expected from a mother. His father, who fortunately for Huck is more often absent than present, is a drunken, abusive thief and con man. Huck has, except for a few months in his life, lived in various lean-tos in the woods, and has never had any kind of formal education in either school or church. At fourteen Huck has never heard of heaven or hell and doesn't know what prayer is.
But he is what one might describe today as street smart. He has folk wisdom and common sense rather than book learning. All of Huck's experiences in his story show him to be an outcast and an outlaw. His primary action in the story, running away with the slave Jim, finds him in violation of a law which holds that Jim is property that rightfully belongs to his mistress, Miss Watson. Though he longs to do the right thing and to be like Tom Sawyer, for example, Huck nevertheless continues until the end of the tale to help Jim reach freedom, contrary to all civil and religious law and expectation. Throughout the story he lies repeatedly, and he steals ("borrowing, " he calls it).
Even from the first he is an "outlaw" in Tom Sawyer's gang. At the Grangerfords' he is incapable of understanding their social code and breaks it by helping the daughter of the household to run away with young Shepherds on, with whose family the Grangerfords are feuding. In Arkansas, where his outlaw companions stage the Royal Nonesuch and where he feels sorry for the old drunk killed by the patriarch who runs the town, he is just one step ahead of the law. He then cooperates with his outlaw friends to cheat the Wilks family in Mississippi and in turn breaks their code to see that the Wilks girls get their money. Finally, he commits what he thinks is an illegal act by helping free Jim from the Phelps plantation. So Huck is continually at war with society, and with society's values.
However, this is a society that encourages game-playing (like the feud and other romantic rituals) and pretense. Often lies or pretenses come in the form of game-playing or role-playing, or "conning" someone in a more exploitative way. Occasionally the lie or the pretense has a great deal of truth in it. Sometimes society requires pretense, and sometimes the game-playing or pretense is a way to cover up unpleasant realities.
Sometimes the pretense or game is a way of hiding from society. Huck, who is so concerned with truth and lies that he brings up the subject in the first paragraph of his tale, often pretends in order to manipulate others, as a way to survive in a dangerous setting. Obviously, in the landscape through which Huck travels, the truth is difficult to discern. Game-playing and pretense are first assumed when Tom Sawyer comes on the scene to form a gang. Tom pretends that pigs are gold, vegetables are jewels, and a Sunday School picnic is a band of Arabs.
Tom alters reality in the name of style and romance, and like much of the pretense and game-playing in the novel, his imaginings have a strong element of violence. In the case of Tom Sawyer's gang, the boys take oaths to cut the throats of members who betray the gang and to kill their families as well. In associating violence with pretense, the business of the gang is "robbery and murder" (18). Tom's game-playing, shaped by the romantic fiction of his society, is in part his way of transforming a dull, small-town existence into something more exciting. For him, the style to which he pretends is everything; substance and truth are secondary. In many ways, Tom's schemes are unintended rehearsals for adult living in a violent world, even though the ugliness that pervades his world is largely made romantic.
Huck, however, is an outsider in Tom's society, which is shaped by the romantic tradition of the Old World; he is able to discern what he calls Tom's lies: "So then I judged that all that stuff was only just one of Tom Sawyer's lies" (23). At the same time, Huck is impressed with the way Tom does things "right" and with "style" and "by the books, " which usually means pretending and role-playing. At about the same time Tom is pretending that he is heading up a band of robbers, Pap is conning the new judge and his wife into believing that he is a reformed alcoholic when he is actually still a hopeless drunk. Pap plays the part in order to get what he wants.
The judge and his wife believe him because they want the world to be more hopeful and the people in it like Pap to be more pleasant than they really are, just as Tom wants the world to be more romantic than it is. While Tom is the master of pretense in the name of style and romance, the king and duke are masters of the lie known as the con game. Huck never seems to know their true identity. Nevertheless, just as he recognizes Tom's games for the lies they are, yet goes along with him up to a point, so he recognizes the king and the duke as "liars" and "just low-down humbugs and frauds, " yet goes along with them to protect Jim (127). The duke calls himself a stage actor. Actually, both the king and the duke are actors, not only in the Shakespearean parody and Royal Nonesuch they perform, but in the various roles they assume to con the public -- reformed pirate, medicine man, preacher, and so on.
And in a very real sense, all the characters are actors. Tom, of course, is an actor in his romantic schemes with the gang and in trying to free Jim (whom he knows is free anyway). The hapless drunk Boggs ridiculously assumes the stance of a dangerous killer, and Colonel Sherburn accuses the lynch mob of pretending to be brave men instead of the cowards that they really are. And this scene is paired with the circus, in which a trained and sober acrobatic clown pretends to be a drunk in danger of being killed on a horse. Jim and Huck must also take on roles to survive in this slaveholding society. While Huck admires Tom for his exciting ways of arranging events, even if they aren't real, Huck ironically has real, truly dangerous adventures, as is seen in the case of his escape from Pap, which in itself involves pretense and deception.
Huck's secret plan of digging out of the shed, laying in supplies, spreading blood around, and escaping to an island is real and dangerous and necessary for his survival and his freedom. Curiously, this, Huck's escape to freedom, contains many of the same elements that Tom insists they pretend to, unnecessarily, to add more "style" to the freeing of Jim from the Phelps farm. Just as Huck begins his journey with a pretense of being dead and with a lie of omission in failing to tell Jim that he put the snake's skin on his bedding, Jim also starts off their journey with a lie of omission by failing to tell Huck that Pap is the dead man in the floating house. Society also requires pretense and roleplaying of Jim.
He must play the role that the white man expects of him by shuffling and groveling, as he does at the first and last of the novel when they are in civilization. Huck plays roles throughout the novel in order to survive in freedom from social restrictions and to protect Jim. All the roles he assumes reflect the truth of his experiences and his longings. In each case, when he takes on a false identity, Huck, who has never had a family, conjures up a family for himself. And each case involves some element of violence or tragedy which is the reality of his young existence. Huck pretends to have a sick, down-and-out mother, and then, as George Peters, a mother and father who have died and an abusive guardian from whom he is fleeing.
He pretends to have a family that is sinking aboard the Walter Scott. In his third pretense, he has a father with smallpox, and the fourth part he plays -- that of George Jackson -- also includes a family, all of whom have run away or died, while he has almost drowned falling off a steamboat. To the king and the duke he pretends to have a family who drowned when their raft collided with a steamboat. It seems that the further Huck ventures from civilization and society, the more mature he becomes.
And it is here on Jackson Island that Huck meets up with Jim, the slave who was the butt of him and Toms follies. When he comes across his fellow runaway on Jacksons Island, he is so glad to have his loneliness relieved by any sort of company that he hardly thinks of difficulties (Adams 43). Jim has escaped from his owner Miss Watson for fear of being sold down the river and being torn apart from his wife and children. It is here that Huck makes one of the most mature decisions of his young life, to help Jim escape from the bonds of slavery. The process of Huck's moral growth is, in fact, most emphatically indicated by his decision to free Jim from slavery, which is an act of rebellion against society. It is here that Huck's real growth is evident.
He shows his first big step in maturation by being tolerant of Jim and not looking down upon him as a lowly slave, as he and Tom had done earlier. Huck's first decision to help Jim escape is made casually enough in the process of his own flight from civilization and from the domination of his father (Adams 43). After finding out that the town is searching for the escaped Jim and Huck's dead body, this unlikely pair set out for an adventure down the mighty Mississippi River that will be the staging for the continuing growth of Huckleberry Finns maturity. Another experience that aids in the maturity of Huck is his stay at the Grangerfords. It is here that Huck truly gets the taste of a normal family environment that he has been deprived of, but he later discovers and observes something that he will remember for the rest of his life. Huck's stay with Grangerfords is short-lived though, but it helps to further his moral growth as a person.
The Grangerfords are involved in a bloody family feud with the Sheperdsons, so bloody and long-standing a feud that it rivals that of the Hatfield's and Mccoy's. It is as deeply horrifying to Huck as it could possibly be to Clemens (Adams 46). This feud comes as a horrible shock to the young Finn. And it is through this feud that Huck comes to the realization of just how bad hatred and war could really be. This was amplified when the Grangerfords member he had come to know well and admire, Buck, was killed in the feud. This brutal killing of the two boys makes Huck so sick that he cannot even tell about it in detail without getting sick again; and his admiration for the better qualities of the aristocrats is more than canceled by the result of their violence.
Death and destruction can have a profound effect on any man, much less a young boy. This experience rattles the young Finn to the core of his morality and helps to shape and mold his maturity from a boy to a man. It is from this kind of violence that Huck escapes to the river again, wishing that he hadnt ever come ashore that night to see such things. I aint ever going to get shut out of them -- lots of times I dream about them (Twain 145). Huck's experience with the Grangerfords certainly taught him a great deal about strong emotions, which in turn helped him to mature. The best example of Huck's maturation is when he comes to befriend the Duke and the Dauphin.
These two characters help not only to strengthen Huck Finns values, but to also help him realize what they were in the first place, a couple of lowly con artists who go from town to town bilking people out of their hard earned money. Even though Huck knows that these two are complete frauds, but must be silent so that the greater good of getting down the river to Jims freedom is achieved. He sees immediately what frauds these are, but he is pleased when the Duke knuckles under; for what you want, above all things, on a raft, is for everybody to be satisfied, and feel right and kind towards others (Twain 177). However, as the story progresses, Huck becomes more and more unwilling to do what the Dauphin and Duke say. Huck develops a morality, and with that matures to the level where he is able to detect that the Duke and Dauphins actions are morally wrong.
The reader of Huck's tale can conclude that the whole slaveholding society is made up of actors and pretenders -- pretending to believe in brotherhood, gentleness, and Christian charity while killing, cheating, and imprisoning each other. Perhaps this explains why Huck never has the ambition to grow wealthy. Free of the forms, social games, and roleplaying that restrict his freedom and cover over the inhumanity of the culture he has struggled in, he can live a life without pretense in the natural, unsettled territory in the West, which opens its arms to the outcast. Bibliography 1. Adams, Kirk. Marc Twain and his Literary Heritage.
New York: Random House, 1992. 2. Bell, David. The Criticisms of Marc Twain. Michigan: Zondervan Publishers, 1987. 3.
Franklin, B. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Dover Publications, 1996. 4. Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Harper Collins, 1984.
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