When we were kids, in school, most of had to read Huck Finn by Mark Twain. Book report required, too. But how many of us ingested what this book offered and what it means to the American debate on morality, race, and the original sin of slavery that we contend with in ever-changing degrees?

If you are someone unnerved by the race conversation that never seems to resolve itself, it might be time to step back into the classroom as adults and reconsider what Twain offers us in his insightful and challenging book.

This conversation narrows in the face of authority Huck reckons with: Father. Founding Father’s. And the side-kick.

The Three Faces of Authority Influencing Huck Finn

The Father

Does Mark Twain and his relationship with his own father play into what Huck experiences with Pap? This question arises because the father is key for every human being who has a personal father and later, father-figures expressed in the wider context of leadership in a society.

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) appeared to have a complex but not particularly abusive relationship with his father, John Marshall Clemens. The elder Clemens was stern, ambitious, and somewhat distant but was an upstanding citizen overall, a justice of the peace who struggled financially but maintained social respectability.

The elder did die when young Samuel was eleven, leaving the family in financial hardship. This likely made the younger Clemens take up the mantle of “the father” in his family and could have also got him thinking at a deeper level than others at the time.

Founding Fathers

Rather than autobiographical then, Pap and his intense representation of ignorance and even violence might be more about a serious and troubling digression in white men of the time. Was Twain critiquing these men that collectively drug down the founding-fathers ideals of all men being created equal? Yes, the country went to war to express and uphold that ideal but by the 1880s, Reconstruction was ending and Jim Crow emerged. America was then, in many ways, reverting to those reprehensible Pap-like attitudes. Could it be then that Clemens was writing Hucks moral growth as the individual reality of many that faced the equal and opposite pressure of Pap-like characters, and even friends like Tom Sawyer?

Side-Kick: Tom

And let’s take a closer look at Tom Sawyer then, who make a reappearance at the end of Huck Finn. It is Tom, alone, who effectively stifles Huck’s remarkable moral reckoning.

Huck learned, by experience, what he had done to Jim (dehumanized him based on color and social pressure) and was done with that, willing to go to hell before betraying Jim again. But here comes Tom. A hero. A role model. Well-educated and part of the elite of the time and then off-spring of the failed founding father’s. Not only does Tom dehumanize Jim but does so for sport.

Let’s break this down:

* Tom knows Jim is already free but prolongs his suffering for entertainment

* Tom turns Jim’s desperate quest for freedom into elaborate theatrical performance and prioritizes his romantic notions of “proper” escapes over Jim’s humanity

* Tom thus represents the educated “civilized” society that can intellectualize away human suffering

Tom’s presence in the story makes Huck’s final decision to “light out for the Territory” even more significant. He’s not just rejecting Aunt Sally’s attempts to “sivilize” him, but fleeing a world where even his closest friend can be so indifferent to human suffering.

Huck Finn is a powerful, complex story that allows each of us to examine the influences we face when choosing a path we know is morally wrong. We see, in Huck, the personal struggle we all face in our lives and in our society.

✍🏻Your Turn:

Like Huck faces Pap’s crude violence, then society’s ‘civilizing’ pressure, then Tom’s sophisticated cruelty, does your protagonist face different forms of the same opposition as they grow? How might the ‘enemy’ become more subtle or insidious?

Looking forward to reading what you come up with.

Thanks for reading (and thinking),

Jennifer 🐦‍⬛

PS: All this talk about Huck Finn now prepares us to dive deep into James by Percival Everett. What is it? An important novel of our time? A kick at the cornerstone of American literature? A political agenda? An experiment? We’ll talk about all this with a deep examination of plot in my next post.

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