Huckleberry Finn: The Epic of American Literature

or Why the Long Pace, Mr. Twain?

Mark Twain’s celebrated bildungsroman suffers from one perceived and significant flaw: its lengthy and ambiguous ending. Critics are confused about Tom’s senseless antics, the inhumane torture of Jim, and Huck’s return to simplicity and complaisance. Much has been made about the significance of the evasion scenes since the famous attacks and defenses of Marx, Trilling, and Eliot, and yet it seems critics are no closer to the answer than they were over half a century ago. The decades old controversy is not as convoluted as one might think. The arguments below do not attempt to qualify Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as the great American novel or even venture to evaluate its literary quality. Rather, this essay attempts to explain the origins and interpret the semiotics of Twain’s lengthy plot in defense of its ending.

The challenge in crafting this analysis lay not in the analysis itself, but in avoiding the clichéd and jaded arguments surrounding the end of Huck Finn. Needless to say, this essay will not repeat the oft-quoted notice posted inside the text, for this author has no fear of storytellers and steamboat captains. In defiance of the Chief of Ordinance and that peerless raconteur, an attempt will indeed be made to find motive, moral, and plot, not upon the surface of the vast Mississippi Run, but deep beneath its muddy waters, between the lines of its depiction, and behind the mind’s eye of Samuel L. Clemens. The lengthy evasion scenes of Huck Finn, though ostensibly insignificant and unnecessary, are actually an integral part of a structural archetype called the hero’s journey, and Twain employed this plot to create a distinctly American epic, like the Odyssey, but in a distinctly American genre — the tall tale.

The Controversy

Critics have been searching for a justification for the lengthy ending of Huck Finn for over half a century. Our story begins with the emergence of the New Criticism and its critics’ obsession with unity, for under close scrutiny, Twain’s narrative structure falls apart at the seams during the evasion scenes, at least in the new criticism of the 1950s. These attacks were not scant, nor were the defenses: “Between 1950 and 1991, there were no fewer than 80 publications — articles, chapters, monographs — defending the ending of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and innumerable discussions in longer works” (Henrickson 14). Gary Henrickson traces the debate, ultimately settling on the tenuous argument that Twain’s writing style and habits were not suited to an undertaking of this magnitude, and that unity is not to be found, nor looked for. He is happy to accept Twain’s genius in his episodic humor and clever wording, but not much else. Citing Hershel Parker’s assertion that New Critics have an “overriding compulsion to make sense of the printed text at all costs” (16), he claims that many of the overwrought analyses are simply too ingenious for Twain’s ability as a writer.

In his assertion of Twain’s ineptitude, Henrickson ironically reveals a major flaw in his argument. Several remarkable points are made in his survey of defenders of the controversial ending. He discusses Scott Carpenter’s existentialist notions that the novel “establishes meaning in the form one might refer to as myth” (17), though Carpenter’s argument falls short as he claims that the novel moves from the Romantic to the absurd, and therefore the ending necessitates Tom’s shenanigans. He should have followed the mythic journey to its end. Several critics argued the rebirth of Huck as Tom, though fall short in explaining the length of the episodes involved in his return. Millicent Bell claimed Huck’s story is an allegory for the acquisition of consciousness, Huck likely representing unconscious, illiterate man, poked and prodded to consciousness with poetry and drama, Tom’s romances. Certainly the unconscious plays an important and symbolic role, but this American allegory is far more than a mere awakening to consciousness.

The notion that Huck Finn is a venture into consciousness is actually supported by the writing habits of its author, for when Henrickson describes Twain’s style, he reveals the very reason why the novel is such a complicated allegory — it is not a creation of consciousness, but of that vast, godlike organism that processes a million times more data than our feeble conscious minds are ever aware of. Henrickson’s argument depends heavily on the fact that Twain was a disorganized composer, that he worked in fits and starts, and a writer such as that could not have possibly constructed the complex narrative evinced by the mythological interpretation. But here is where his argument is not only untenable, but elementary and pedestrian, as well. In his ultimate paragraph, Henrickson makes the bold claim that “Twain was the divine amateur and Huckleberry Finn a wonderful accident, an accident he was never able to repeat” (27). That may be so, but this fact does not belie the mythological allegory. It is, in fact, its strongest corroboration.

J.C. Furnas provides some of the most colorful, yet ridiculous, arguments attacking the flaws of Twain’s ending. Furnas sarcastically and completely discounts Norman Mailer’s brilliant observation that Huck Finn is “the American epic hero” (519), focusing more on less significant aspects of the argument, namely that the novel expresses “our germinal past” (519). Furnas seems almost offended at the notion, and though I cannot fully agree with Mailer’s interpretation, his arrow did not fall far from the mark when he called Huck an epic hero. Furnas makes numerous references to the overwrought symbolism imbued upon the river and the comparisons to the Odyssey, claiming the effect “of all that sort of thing is so to blur the actual nature of the text in question that it will sound like a blend of Moby-Dick and Uncle Tom’s Cabin ghosted by Thomas Wolfe, its chief merits consisting of the river-symbolism and the way Nigger Jim as essence of black slavery causes Huck’s soul to bud and blossom” (520). Furnas’s argument blossoms into bosh when he uses Twain’s ironic disclaimer as an actual defense against analysis and meaning. There are gems in this essay, but mostly culled from other critics, and its overall effect is more pathetic than logical.

There are few readers “enchanted by the Tomfoolery at the end of Huckleberry Finn” (Ornstein 698). Robert Ornstein further suggests that Huck and Tom are projections of the author, like a satirical mask, and that “Tom is Twain’s admission of reality, his somewhat embarrassed projection of self: an inventor of boyhood adventures, a half-hearted, compromising rebel against society” (701). Huck, by contrast, represents Twain’s truly creative self — untrained, untaught, unrestrained, a natural expression of his unconscious mind. Against this backdrop one might suppose that Huck and Tom represent two parts of the author’s brain, and Tom’s reemergence is in reality the reassertion of control by the ego-consciousness. Ornstein’s argument is basically a defense of the ending, but not an enthusiastic one: The return of Tom is symbolic of Twain’s own “commitment to a social order from which (unlike Huck) he saw no escape” (702). Ornstein’s speculations could support a number of theories, and yet they do little to bolster his own argument. What is apropos to this analysis is the notion that Huck is somehow an unconscious projection of the author, supporting this critical application of the hero’s journey archetype, a literary figure of the personal struggle for identity.

Don Quixote, like Huck, has also been interpreted as a type of epic hero. A comparison of Huck Finn to Don Quixote suggests that “Mark Twain had a very definite plan in the final episode which depends on repetitions and variations of themes presented earlier in the novel,” and this repetition in the evasion scenes serves to ridicule, “in the manner of Don Quixote,” the romantic tradition (Gullason 87). In this interpretation, Tom is antagonist, and his character completes a dualism between romance and reality, as in the famed Cervantes work. Jim’s life, like Don Quixote’s fantastic adventures and human consciousness, is a lie. Huck, by contrast, develops “a soberer insight into man’s inhumanity to man, into life as it is” (90). Tom is society, Huck is freedom. Tom reappears in the final chapters so that Huck can reject his “romantic irresponsibility (which he first suspected in Chapter II) and society’s cruel nature” (91). The evasion scenes serve as a stage for Huck’s penultimate awakening, the knowledge of Jim’s worth as a person.

Until now, little has been said about the actual length of the evasion scenes. The above arguments rest upon a return of Tom, but not necessarily in so many episodes. In “Huckleberry Finn and the Time of the Evasion,” Gollin and Gollin take a historical approach and critique the ending as regards its significance to the condition of freedmen in the 1880s, when this part of the novel was written. Using his own words, the authors demonstrate that despite his conviction that blacks deserved freedom just like any human being and his altruistic gestures towards the black community, Mark Twain maintained an attitude of superiority towards blacks. The final chapters are, therefore, an attempt to “resolve his mixed attitudes” (14). Furthermore, the evasion scenes parallel the historical emancipation of the slaves in the South — the lengthy farce to free Jim, who is already free, resembles the lengthy struggle for true freedom of a people freed by law and war many years before.

The character of Jim takes on a greater significance in this historical allegory, but all along it is clear that the runaway slave is important. Chadwick Hansen likens the evolution of Jim’s character to the evolution of Huck’s conscience, and indeed, Huck the narrator controls every aspect of description. It is entirely likely that Jim underwent no change at all except in the mind of his young co-pilot. Jim’s first appearance is as the comic stage Negro, whose sub-human ignorance “protects him from the mental pain of humiliation,” and therefore we are “free to laugh at him” (46). The next time Jim appears, he is still the ignorant and comic character of before, but this time juxtaposed with white Huck, who takes stock in the same superstitions. Jim is necessarily elevated through Huck’s demotion. Instead of laughing at the comic Negro, “we are asked to think of ourselves as men, laughing at human ignorance and superstition” (47). Jim is evolving in Huck’s mind.

On Jackson’s Island, before Huck has his first crisis of conscience, Jim is starting to develop into a person instead of property, though his initial observation is, ironically, that he belongs to himself. He reflects on his newfound freedom: “I’s rich now, come to look at it. I owns myself, en I’s wuth eight hund’d dollars” (Twain 47). It’s not quite a human identity, but it is fast approaching one. With this revelation, “Jim becomes something more than the ordinary stage Negro” and “more than a stereotype” (Hansen 48). As the adventure develops, Jim evinces “a good deal of common sense” (49), prompting Huck to exclaim, “Well, he was right; he was most always right; he had an uncommon level head for a nigger” (Twain 76). Jim is starting to appear as some sort of guide for Huck rather than a piece of property to be dragged along and hidden from the white man. His wisdom is nowhere more salient than in the discussion that follows about Frenchmen and their dialects. Huck assumes that “ethnic difference is founded in nature, and has, therefore, the same magnitude and necessity as difference in species. Jim immediately spots the fallacy” (Hansen 50). In this episode, Jim is no doubt the wise elder.

Jim’s role, then, in this bildungsroman is to lead Huck in the development of his conscience. It is why the two do not immediately escape north to the free side of the river. Huck is forced to “come to grips with that part of himself that belongs to society, forces him to ‘decide, forever, betwixt two things,’ forces him to decide to go to hell rather than betray his fellow human being” (Hansen 58). He is the fetish through which is developed Huck’s conscience. He is, according to Hansen, the “white man’s burden ... Jim’s function is quite literally to be Huck’s moral burden” (58). Huck must journey down the river, to be guided and protected, not a freed man, but by a fellow man. This realization requires the long journey, even the disputed evasion scenes, for Huck must be given a chance to return to civilization, and subsequently reject its hypocrisy.

In any case, Jim is on all levels representative of that which yearns to be free, whether it be man or mind. Huck Finn, then, “is a novel of escapes: Huck must escape from Judith Loftis, the Grangerfords, and the Wilkses; Jim from slave hunters and Huck’s attempted betrayals; and both from St. Petersburg, the Walter Scott, the Duke and Dauphin, and the Phelps farm” (Derosa 157). The evasion scenes are in part a homage, albeit highly inaccurate, to the classic escape plot. Tom’s escape, however, differs from the rest, in that it is unsuccessful, based not on experiential learning, but on book learning. Huck and Jim, throughout their treacherous endeavor down the Mississippi, make successful escapes against the odds. This leads Derosa to the argument that Twain was demonstrating a contrast between “two conflicting worldviews: Platonic typological thinking and Darwinian population-based thinking” (159). Huck’s behavioral training and observational learning serves him well; Tom’s literary upbringing serves him not. Huck’s experience teaches him that Jim is his fellow man, despite the fact that his society has taught him that Jim is chattel. In the light of this argument, Twain seems an advocate for desegregation, refuting in subtle ways the religious defenses of slavery with Darwin’s scientific theory.

The debate is yet satisfied, and structuralists, who had the most to lose in this debate, posed even more framework arguments. David Kaufman states in his analysis of satiric deceit that “the structural and thematic deceptions that unify Huck Finn and determine the ending’s relationship to the rest of the novel derive from Twain’s strategy of deceit during closure” (67). The audience then becomes the butt of an extended practical joke, creating a confrontational relationship between author and audience. The sheer length of the evasion is again logically defended: “Here too, we find the purpose of the ending’s length: to hide and lead the reader away from the central deceit, Huck’s unreliability, for part of Twain’s purpose is to demonstrate our inability to see through disguises” (72). This is a theme throughout, as “[a]gain and again Huck becomes someone he is not” (72). The novel then becomes, appropriately, a story of identity, whether that of the manumitted slave, or growing boy, or the developing conscience.

A more convincing, though wholly unsatisfying, structural argument is made by Frank Baldanza, who repeats the criticism of Twain’s sporadic and undisciplined work habits, but in this case to reinforce, rather than undermine, the unity of Huck Finn. Baldanza cites a plethora of symbols and repetitions that support his analysis and ultimately credits Twain’s unconscious mind for their creation: “The very proliferation of such repetitions, in fact, proves that Twain had no control over them and that they simply flowed from his pen as exuberant impulse” (354). Baldanza examines these symbols, yet fails to deliver an actual unified theme. He merely asserts that the evasion scenes are unified with the rest of the novel because of these shared symbols and repetitions. This interpretation would seem to lie somewhere in the liminal space between New Criticism and Structuralism, with a tenuous notion of unity at its core.

One theory even analyzes the geographical structure of Huck’s journey down the Mississippi. Michael Miller identified a significant change in geographical fidelity in which the previously realistic detail and careful description are replaced by “what may be called an eternal landscape, one in which man’s demarcation of the river yields to a Mississippi both uncharted and timeless” (192). The point of change suggests a transcendence of memory, an escape from the “mechanistic, compartmentalizing vision of the world” (204). A working memory is the foundation of consciousness, and therefore to diverge from the memories of the river is to begin to transcend the ego. This movement is archetypically represented by an escape from civilization to the natural world, illustrated by Huck’s description of the sunrise in Chapter XIX, which is not coincidentally “the precise point where the pilot’s memory effectively exits the book” (205). What Huck finds at the end of his journey is not freedom, but true freedom, freedom from consciousness, freedom from the memories of separation and abandonment and abuse, and more importantly for the superficial plot, freedom from the notion that one man could ever rightfully be the property of another.

If we think less about the specific geography of the journey and more about the symbolic implications, we are perhaps drawn again to comparison with The Odyssey. When Odysseus lands in Ithaca, he “disguises himself, and begins by cunning and ingenuity to make his way home” (Solomon 11). At this point in the epic, twelve chapters are left. Huckleberry Finn reflects the “tradition and essential pattern of The Odyssey; therefore, one would expect to see a similarity in archetypes and semiotics, and indeed one does. There are even a number of specific comparisons within the episodes. One such comparison is Huck’s escape from his father’s hut and Ulysses’ escape from Calypso. But the specifics are unimportant. What matters is the archetype, the classical hero’s journey, though altered with a singular American taste in Twain’s newly invented genre — the epic tall tale.

The Analysis

Joseph Campbell’s consummate work on the subject, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, identifies the specific phases of the hero’s journey archetype as evinced in numerous mythological and literary sources. The overall narrative structure of Huckleberry Finn, including those pesky evasion scenes, resembles this archetype quite closely. Besides numerous overt correlations, there are quite a few subtleties as well. To find meaning in the analysis, we will have to look more specifically at each of the elements of the hero’s journey archetype and its corresponding passage or symbol in Huck Finn.

The Call to Adventure

The hero’s call to adventure often starts with a blunder which “reveals an unsuspected world, and the individual is drawn into a relationship with forces that are not rightly understood” (Campbell 51). The real journey doesn’t begin until Huck and Jim depart from Jackson Island, which is typical of the call to adventure, for the “circumstances of the call are the dark forest, the great tree, the babbling spring, and the loathly, underestimated appearance of the carrier of the power of destiny” (51–2). On the island we see the forest and the trees, and in the great Mississippi we can imagine the “babbling spring” and feel confident in its role as the carrier of the power of destiny. Until Huck reaches the island, the narrative is largely setup and backstory. Perhaps Twain was not yet attuned to his unconscious musings and was merely expositing in early chapters. Nonetheless, when Huck realizes (by accident) that Jim has escaped, he hears the call, his first crisis of conscience. Huck agrees not to tell. He laments having to keep his word, for people will call him “a low down Ablitionist and despise [him] for keeping mum” (Twain 43). His word is his bond, but he has shed none of the misconceptions of Southern society about race. He has made no progress at this point. He is merely using his time on the island for entertainment.

Huck is nevertheless at a turning point on the island. In the call to adventure, “there is an atmosphere of irresistible fascination about the figure that appears suddenly as guide, marking a new period, a new stage, in the biography” (Campbell 55). We are introduced to Jim in Chapter IV as “Miss Watson’s nigger, Jim” (Twain 17). When Huck first sees him on the island, he identifies him at first as “Miss Watson’s Jim” (41), losing the racial epithet. After that, Huck refers to him primarily as Jim. He has already started to see something new in the runaway slave, something more human. What was once meaningful to Huck, the ideology of slave-holding society, is slowly but surely being called into question. But Huck, like the epic hero, at first ignores the call, even when Jim is bitten by the rattlesnake.

Refusal of the Call

The hero often hesitates and refuses the initial call to adventure. The refusal “is essentially a refusal to give up what one takes to be one’s own interest” (Campbell 60). Huck has not transcended his egotistical nature and has yet to realize that Jim’s personal freedom is more significant than his own personal reputation. The refusal of the hero symbolizes “an impotence to put off the infantile ego ... One is bound in by the walls of childhood; the father and mother stand as threshold guardians” (62). Huck’s threshold guardian is his literal father, Pap, who he believes is still alive; and Jim’s is the bond of slavery. With freedom just across the river in Illinois, Huck in typical fashion ignores the call and keeps Jim in slave country on Jackson Island. But it doesn’t take long for Huck’s feelings about Jim to change. They tell each other stories, and Jim imparts his wisdom. Through these conversations, Jim begins to reveal a newfound sense of identity, that of a man who is owned by no one but himself. Their time together on the island almost resembles a familial relationship, with Huck even suggesting that they might have pets. Jim’s protectiveness of Huck becomes evident in Chapter X, when he hides the dead man’s face because, he says, “he might come and ha’nt us” (52), when in reality Jim was sheltering Huck from seeing the rotting face of his own father. When Huck finds out from Mrs. Judith Loftis that men are hunting Jim, he finally and unhesitatingly accepts the call to adventure, and the two set off down the mighty and mysterious Mississippi River.

Supernatural Aid

Often in the hero’s journey, the departing hero is aided by a supernatural force or protective guide. Jim has come to be Huck’s protector, but only for the sake of humanizing the former slave. He is not the archetypical wise elder in this journey, though he might be easily mistaken for one. The real protector is the river, and our hero often flees to it after encountering trouble on shore. A common image in classical mythologies is that of the ferryman, and it does not take a giant leap of inference to see the river as a type of supernatural guide and aide, or perhaps more accurately described as a super, natural guide and aide. Campbell describes the outset of the journey: “Having responded to his own call, and continuing to follow courageously as the consequences unfold, the hero finds all the forces of the unconscious at his side. Mother Nature herself supports the mighty task” (72). When Huck and Jim set off on the raft, the river itself is ferryman, for they have little control over their destiny and drift with its whims and tempests. The river is both “protective and dangerous, motherly and fatherly at the same time” (73). For the orphan Huck and the slave Jim, the parental nature of the river fills a void. It is a place of storms and mishaps, but also a harbor from the dangers of man. The Mississippi River is the proverbial ferryman, for the actual man on the ferry in this analysis serves as an entirely different symbol.

Crossing of the First Threshold

Huck and Jim cross the threshold when they at last drift below the island, but they are not out of harm’s way. In fact, they have stepped right in it, a land beyond the threshold, beyond the safety of Jackson Island (safe at least for the hero, Huck), “beyond the parental watch ... and beyond the protection of his society” (Campbell 77). The hero at this point is typically content to “remain within the indicated bounds,” as was Huck seemingly content to remain with the bounds of his Southern society. But he is spurred into a panic by Loftis, the Pan of this allegory, the liminal deity “dwelling just beyond the protected zone of the village boundary” (81). Like Pan, Loftis presents a dilemma. Huck can return unenlightened to slaveholding society, to human civilization, to ego-consciousness; or he can pass “into a new zone of experience” (82). Once Huck has crossed the threshold, he cannot turn back. He is now a fugitive like Jim, but his personal evolution is only beginning. The physical threshold is below Jackson Island, but Huck’s personal threshold is the moment he realizes he cannot in good conscience sacrifice Jim to Southern society.

The Belly of the Whale

The first few days of Huck’s journey are rather uneventful, and the entrance to the belly of the whale is not yet realized, though a part of it has already been made clear: “The hero, instead of conquering of conciliating power of the threshold, is swallowed into the unknown, and would appear to have died” (90). This apparent death and rebirth is a common motif in the novel, but none are more significant than Huck’s faked demise, for it follows him throughout the narrative, even allowing for his rebirth as Tom in the final chapters. The whale itself is apparently the wrecked steamer, Walter Scott. Huck and Jim enter the belly of the boat and later emerge with a new understanding of the danger and darkness of their endeavor. Here the departure to the hero’s journey is complete, there is no turning back, and the next stage is Huck’s initiation into esoterica.

The Road of Trials

The road of trials in Huckleberry Finn lies along the shores of the Mississippi River. This is a “dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials” (Campbell 97). Curiously fluid indeed. The ambiguous forms could not be represented better than by the characters of the Duke and the Dauphin, two men operating under assumed identities, dissembling themselves further as an acting troupe or a traveling ministry. But there are other ambiguous forms as well. The Grangerfords provide Huck with the family structure he has been deprived of all his life, but this is no traditional family, nor is it anything stable like one might expect. Huck is eventually forced to flee the violence of these people, just as he was forced to flee the violence of his real family. Colonel Sherburn stands ambiguously between a civilized sense of honor and a primitive brutality, the contrast furthered by his juxtaposition with the mob that is fain to lynch him. The ambiguity is nowhere more salient than in the Wilks episode — the entire town is torn between two contrasting identities.

In each of these encounters is a trial of the hero. The dangerous escapes and evasions symbolize purification of the self, a “process of dissolving, transcending, or transmuting the infantile images of our personal past” (101). The developing youth is a common and germane figure in this metaphor of transformation. Between the allegory and the adventure lies another level, that of Twain’s personal ambivalence towards blacks. This unconscious purification perhaps surfaces in this particular narrative as a means to reconcile Twain’s own feelings, and therefore through these trials, Huck also learns that Jim is a human being, deserving of his life and his freedom.

The Meeting with the Goddess

At some point on this road of trials, the hero meets with the goddess, usually approaching the peak of the crisis. The goddess “is the incarnation of the promise of perfection; the soul’s assurance that, at the conclusion of its exile in a world of organized inadequacies, the bliss that once was known will be known again: the comforting, the nourishing, the ‘good’ mother” (Campbell 111). Here we might look to Mary Jane, who appears in the final trial before the evasion scenes. She becomes a mother figure to Huck, at least she is so kind to him that he decides to risk his life stealing her family money back from the royal shysters. He says to himself, “this is a girl that I’m letting that old reptile rob her of her money!” (Twain 176). With many lies and a few truths, he wins her over, as in the hero’s journey, in which “[t]he meeting with the goddess (…) is the final test of the talent of the hero to win the boon of love” (Campbell 118). Huck has not just come to realize Jim’s humanity, but he has extended this new selfless nature even further, to a stranger.

Woman as the Temptress

Once the hero has wandered the road of trials and met with the goddess, the female figure then becomes that of temptress, luring him back to the mundane world which she represents. At first, one might see this archetype in the character of Aunt Sally, who could lure Huck back into the civilized life with care and cooking. But Huck has no intentions of staying — he is there to rescue Jim. The temptress in this allegory is not so easily identified. She is, and can only be, Miss Watson. Watson represents the old slave-holding society, and though her actions seem altruistic towards the black man, they are not. Ornstein argues:

“Here is perhaps the crowning act of selfishness and pious greed: the desire to make the best of all possible worlds. Because Miss Watson cannot take Jim with her, she finds it easy to listen to the faint inner voice of decency … her ‘benevolence’ may be compared to the generosity of the usurer who leaves his money to the Church” (700).

Miss Watson’s generosity is tainted, tempting Huck back to the Southern hypocrisy that he eventually must escape.

Atonement with the Father

The father archetype of this journey is none other than Huck’s real father, Pap. In the hero’s journey allegory, the monstrous father figure represents an aspect of the hero’s own mind, the ego that refuses to relinquish control. He is also the embodiment of sin, that notion that the release of suppressed behavior is morally wrong, a notion impressed upon the mind by society and civilization. The father archetype as a “self-generated double monster — the dragon thought to be God (superego) and the dragon thought to be Sin (repressed id)” (Campbell 130). The father that Huck left behind symbolizes his transition to adulthood. But he also represents the psychological barriers of his conscious mind, created by none other than his indoctrination into Southern slaveholding society. Such barriers prevent him from developing as an enlightened being, one who would surely see the depravity of the slave trade and the foolishness of its justifications. Twain plays up the illusion of consciousness brilliantly by killing off Pap early on, but keeping that information from Huck until later in the journey. Just like the conscious mind, which scientists have been searching for in vain for centuries, Pap has no concrete existence: he is a mere figment of Huck’s mind, like the ogre-father of the monomyth. Huck’s atonement with Pap is in reality an atonement with himself.

Apotheosis

Huck’s enlightenment, his apotheosis, comes in Chapter XXXI with the ironic ejaculation, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” (Twain 215). The apotheosis is “the divine state to which the human hero attains who has gone beyond the last terrors of ignorance” (Campbell 151). Twain’s brilliant satire has Huck choose “wrong” over “right,” but this is his criticism of the Southern culture that condoned chattel slavery. In fact, Huck has chosen to stand by his friend and free Jim after an impassioned internal conflict. His words are touching:

“[I] 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 …” (Twain 215).

Huck’s view of Jim has completely evolved. He destroys the letter that he wrote to Miss Watson and decides to free his friend from slavery again.

Through direct experience of Jim’s humanness, Huck has come to the realization that not only are he and Jim alike, they are the same. The lessons Huck has learned from civilization are that Jim is not a human being. But what Huck learns from escaping the confines of his language and society is that Jim is a human being, perhaps even more than a human being, for Huck sacrifices the white Duke and Dauphin to save Jim, proving that he considers Jim superior to those depraved shysters. The ego-consciousness fools us into thinking that it shows and teaches us reality, but reality can only be experienced directly. This is the role that the Southern slaveholding society plays in the allegory — teachers and politicians and priests beguiling children and constituents and parishioners into racist beliefs — and from its fetters Huck figuratively escapes, just as Jim makes his literal exodus.

The Ultimate Boon

Apotheosis brings the ultimate boon. The ultimate boon is the realization of the world after enlightenment. It is a type of immortality, a reward found in countless religions, but not a fairy tale immortality, rather a knowledge of the illusions of such things as time and space. The conscious mind is still present, still conscious. It is simply no longer in control. The enlightened being walks the earth, speaks our language, sees what we see, and yet much more. Huck has traveled to the Deep South and the depths of his mind and reached his enlightenment. Now his ego-consciousness may reassert itself, albeit significantly weakened, as the hero renters into communion with his civilized fellow man. Huck is reborn as Tom. Tom all along has been the ego-consciousness — he is literacy, society, tradition. He relies on the old texts, and they fail him. Huck, by contrast, relies on his experiential knowledge, what he has learned from the treacherous hero’s journey and what freed him from his Southern culture.

Refusal of the Return

Several logical justifications for Tom’s return have been discussed. The question largely unanswered regards his refusal to admit Jim’s freedom and return home. Such a refusal is characteristic of the hero’s journey: “When the hero-quest has been accomplished ... the adventurer must return with his life-transmuting trophy ... the responsibility has frequently been refused” (Campbell 193). The trophy is Jim the free human being, transformed through this process from Jim the bonded slave. But it is Tom, not Huck, who is responsible for the refusal and the lengthy antics that follow, though Huck for the first time asserts his own intuitive opinions in matters. In this interpretation, Huck and Tom are one. The hero Huck refuses the call to return under the influence of his conscious mind, Tom, and he must have a reason for the refusal. Jim’s escape is that reason.

The Magic Flight

The length of the evasion scenes has been cleverly compared to the length of time it took for blacks to truly gain their freedom in the South after their emancipation. But this does not justify the torture of Jim, the endless antics, the illusion of captivity. The trophy which Huck has acquired and must return home is clearly Jim. If the powers that be are in support of the hero, this return can be smooth and uneventful; however, “if the trophy has been attained against the opposition of its guardian, or if the hero’s wish to return to the world has been resented by the gods or demons, then the last stage of the mythological round becomes a lively, often comical, pursuit” (Campbell 197). The Southern slaveholding society has all along been clearly in opposition to Huck’s endeavors to free Jim, so the evasion scenes are a necessary element to this particular version of the allegory. Huck and Tom must repeat a series of trial and errors before they can truly return.

The magic flight is “a favorite episode of the folk tale, where it is developed under many lively forms” (Campbell 199). The tall tale, being essentially a Southern folk tale, would seem especially suited to this stage of the hero’s journey. Diversion and evasion are often characteristic of these flights. Tom’s misuse of Romantic conventions is nothing magical; however, like the stage magician, he is guilty of performing a grand illusion for Huck and Jim. The series of delays is more significant in that it reflects the different variations of the archetype: some traditions use magic, others distracting obstacles, but in all of them the heroes are significantly delayed in their return home through a second set of trials. If Twain were indeed crafting his own version of the classical epic, his American epic tall tale, these lengthy scenes of delays, evasions, and shenanigans are not only justified — they are an essential part of the hero’s journey allegory.

Rescue from Without

Tom’s antics get him shot and Jim captured, and so his evasion plot is foiled. In the hero’s journey, “the hero may have to be brought back from his supernatural adventure by assistance from without” (Campbell 207). When Tom discovers Jim will be sold, he immediately reveals the information from without — that Miss Watson “set him free in her will” (Twain 290). With this, all loose ends are wrapped. Save one.

The Crossing of the Return Threshold and Master of the Two Worlds

Typically in the hero’s journey, once the hero reaches his enlightenment he is able to live among the unawakened, crossing the threshold at will. Huck is not this kind of hero. Huck, like the returning hero, has difficulty accepting what is real, “after an experience of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the passing joys and sorrows, banalities and noisy obscenities of life. Why re-enter such a world?” (Campbell 218). What is real in this world is slavery and the treatment of blacks in the South. Huck cannot return to that. He chooses another path.

Freedom to Live

The hero ultimately gains his freedom, freedom from the pitfalls of emotion and regret, freedom from the illusions of perception, freedom from the limitations of the conscious mind. There is good reason why the body is often called a prison of the soul. It is the perfect allegorical subtext for a narrative of emancipation. At the heart of this allegory is Jim. Throughout this analysis, we have identified each element of the hero’s journey save Jim. He is not the ferryman — that is clearly the river. He is not the unconscious Huck, nor the conscious mind that is Tom. Jim is not part of the traditional epic, and his role is far more likely the contribution of modern man.

How does one gain the type of psychological freedom represented by the hero’s journey? For over two thousand years, since the origin of consciousness, man has sought a means through which to understand that which exists beyond its ken. Countless symbols exist to guide the adherent to transcendence: gods, idols, images, chants, ideas. The Zen Buddhist concentrates his mind on the koan, the Taoist on the yin and yang. The Christian studies the myth of the Messiah in order to understand the ineffable transcendence of consciousness. Some have suggested that Huck is the Christ figure in this narrative. But, in fact, that figure is Jim. He is the fetish through which Huck comes to understand his own mind, and like the albatross that falls free from the neck of the blasted Mariner, Jim is no longer needed after Huck’s apotheosis. Jim has been literally freed from slavery; Huck has been figuratively freed from Jim. Twain’s hero’s journey is for certain a bildungsroman. But beneath the juvenile adventure lies a bildungsroman of the mind. Huckleberry Finn is everything the classical epic could be, brilliantly transformed into an American tradition. In this way, it is the great American novel, and the controversy over the evasion scenes can be finally put to rest.

Works Cited

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