“The Wages Is Just the Same” Huck Finn's Moral Journey to Nowhere Amelia Rasmusen English 104: Great Books December 2

“The wages is just the same” Huck Finn’s Moral Journey to Nowhere

Amelia Rasmusen English 104: Great Books December 2, 2018

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Mark Twain begins Huckleberry Finn by threatening to prosecute, banish, or shoot anybody who searches his narrative for motive, moral, or plot. This preamble perfectly presages the tone of the book by defying any clear interpretation. Huckleberry Finn constantly references the literary tradition with allusions to Hamlet, King Lear, and sentimental poetry. Yet even if it sets itself up as a bildungsroman, it ends up making a mockery of the tradition. The hero achieves nothing and goes nowhere, internally or externally.1 In opposition to the Western tradition’s orderly, moral world, where good, wise actions lead to good consequences and evil, foolish actions lead to bad, stands Twain’s chaotic, luck-driven world, where evil and good trade places moment to moment, and people die no matter what. Twain’s threatening dare gains a new face; the narrative contains no unified motive, moral, or plot, in the traditional sense. Any attempt to finagle the story into a traditional interpretation will fail.2 For if a reader sees moral victory in Huck’s decision to rescue Jim and “go to hell,” he must see the ending as sloppy and the world of Huck Finn as a false picture of reality.3 Rather than looking to find how Twain succeeds or fails in fulfilling the motive-moral-plot formula of the tradition, readers should look at Twain’s craft. Taking the text as a whole, we must view Twain’s protagonist as the child of a bleak world, where control is impossible and change does not lead to progress. This

1 Richard Locke, “Mark Twain’s Free Spirits and Slaves: Huckleberry Finn’s Own Story,” In Critical Children: The Use of Childhood in Ten Great Novels, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013): 86. Locke makes a similar observation but concludes that Huck is “drawing the bars of his prison house,” claiming that Twain uses this subversion of the novel not necessarily to mock the literary tradition but more to express a cynical view of the American values of liberty and freedom. These two implications are not incompatible. 2 David F. Burg, “Another View of Huckleberry Finn,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 29, no. 3 (December 1974): 299- 301. Burg refutes commentary by Henry Nash Smith and Leo Marx, who think that Huck has a positive moral goal of freedom, whereas his very indifference to his lack of control of the Mississippi River and the aimlessness of his adventures both demonstrate that he merely seeks to escape. 3 Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 193.

2 metaphysical basis for Huck’s behavior makes the oft-excoriated and seemingly-depressing ending not only formally consistent but inevitable.

Huck’s unhappy experience of the world shows quite clearly that he has little control or hope for progress in his life. When Pap appears, he uproots Huck completely from the Widow’s house with the force of a typhoon, spiriting him off to a completely contrary type of existence.

With such a complete lack of control over his circumstances, Huck has learned to be ready for anything, including attempted murder with a clasp-knife. He must be ready to shoot his father dead in self-defense and yet, at the same time, he eats and hunts with him. The equalizing tone

Huck uses both to describe these horrors and ordinary life tell the reader of a chilling reality: to

Huck, there is no difference.4 Having grown up with Pap, Huck sees life as inherently unpredictable. This mindset allows him to face many terrible misfortunes with passivity – missing Cairo, the raft’s sudden destruction, and the oppression of the King and the Duke, among others.

Huck shows how a person must make decisions in this kind of unpredictable world. His lack of adherence to universal moral rules is unsurprising, for universal rules only work in the context of order and predictability.5 Hence, when he struggles about revealing the King and

Duke’s nefarious plan to Mary Jane, he considers thus: “I reckon a body that ups and tells the truth when he is in a tight place, is taking considerable many resks, though I hain’t had no

4 Michael Boughn, "Rethinking Mark Twain’s Skepticism: Ways of Knowing and Forms of Freedom in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 52, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 36. Boughn points out a similar callousness in the way Miss Watson has prayer-time for the slaves every night, bewailing “the ordinariness of the violence and horror which not knowing engenders in the world.” He ascribes this willful “not knowing” to Ms. Watson. However, it appears probable that the slaves themselves are complicit in a larger, cultural “not knowing.” The fact that Huck, as a victim, normalizes his father’s unacceptably violent behavior implies the same pattern in slaves. The implication is that if they do not choose to escape, as Jim and Huck eventually do, even victims are complicit in their own victimization. 5 Burg, 302: In a slightly more postmodern tone, Burg argues that Huck recognizes that “in such a world such as ours every man must devise his own view of reality and secure his own redemption, salvation, or damnation, as the case may be.” 3 experience, and can’t say for certain.” Huck is preoccupied with how best to guarantee his own survival. His reasoning is based on experience; hence, taking a leap of faith and doing what seems right is something Huck finds ridiculous. Since he has no experience of telling the truth in such a situation, to do so would be like “setting down on a kag of powder and touching it off just to see where you’ll go to” (169). He describes putting faith into action not merely as holding a candle near a gunpowder keg but as purposely setting off the explosion beneath himself. To

Huck, faith is not merely foolish but practically insane. Because the world is unstable, he needs practical experimentation to formulate hypotheses on which to base his decisions.

As well as developing an empirical epistemology in the face of unpredictability, Huck develops a metaphysics that sees every individual not as free, but determined. At story’s end, Jim and Huck both discover that all of their struggles did not contribute a whit to where they ended.

However, when Huck finds out that Jim had been free all throughout the antics of the Evasion, he expresses no indignation, no feelings of futility or any of the host of emotions that might usually accompany the trivialization of his actions.6 This demonstrates that he has no moral expectations of Tom. He merely feels a sense of relief that Tom had not gone against his good upbringing. The wording of this concern reveals much about Huck’s psyche. Huck simply

“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” (260). Twain italicizes “could,” to emphasize that Huck was befuddled not because it had seemed impossible that Tom would choose to do wrong, but that he

6 Locke: 84-86. Though the specifics of the Jim-Huck relationship escape the scope of this paper, Locke thinks that Huck’s lack of indignation about Jim’s suffering shows he still thinks of Jim in a dehumanizing way, signifying a lack of lasting relational growth throughout the course of the story. However, Huck also ignores his own mistreatment, signaling a different problem than racism. Boughn would agree, for he acknowledges that “Huck is the one having problems with knowing, that he does not know Jim as a friend, or does not yet know that he knows him as such” (44). Burg puts Huck and Jim into the same category: imperfect and essentially passive antiheroes (309). This seems the most reasonable way to think of Jim, in the context of my paper, since he, as Locke spends much time establishing, also demonstrates thought patterns outside of conventional morality, with his reliance on superstition (64-67). 4 would go against his “bringing-up.” This innocuous turn of phrase shows that Huck does not hold people accountable to their actions. The child of a bum will be a bum; the child of a noble will be a noble. Therefore, Huck has no reason to be outraged by wrongdoing – the person is not morally culpable but merely following the rules set them by nature. But because of this, Tom should not be able to violate the rule of his upbringing. If he had, Huck might need to revise his determinist view. But, to his satisfaction, fatalism proves empirically correct, yet again, and his mindset does not change.7

Yet there is another aspect to this story. Rather than following his empirical reasoning,

Huck in fact decides to “chance it” and tell Mary Jane the truth. In return for the compassion she has shown him, and sympathizing with her position of weakness, Huck makes a conscious, premeditated decision to help another person at risk to his personal safety for the first time in the novel. This looks suspiciously like the traditional hero’s development of moral virtue. However, it is merely by coincidence that Huck’s decisions are “moral.” Mary Jane, though seemingly a hopeful character, serves the purpose of exhibiting Huck’s tragic flaw. By giving Huck the opportunity and desire to adopt a different mindset, Twain shows that Huck could not change, even if he wanted to. Huck’s experiential way of assessing the world ends up disallowing him from internalizing moral principles.8 His apparent selflessness has amoral origins: an empirical fatalistic worldview and an involuntary emotional reaction to those who show him kindness.

7 Berg, 300, 306: Further evidence for a fatalist mindset emerges in the characteristics of the river (and hence the journey) itself, as observed by Berg to be “indifferent” and defined by “drift, dream, and accident.” 8 In direct conflict with my exposure of a flaw in Huck’s mindset, Boughn sees this experience-based approach as the one Twain implicitly advocates throughout the story. He points out that despite their adherence to Biblical theories of brotherly love, the Grangerfords “remain unable to deal with it practically” because they lack Huck’s Emersonian ability to seamlessly blend words with actions (39). 5

Tracing Huck’s moral struggles and the conclusions he arrives at about right and wrong, we see that every experiment leads him in a different direction. His first quandary in Chapter 16 over whether to betray/return Jim shows an emotionally-based line of reasoning:

Then I thought a minute and says to myself, hold on – s’pose you’d a done right and give Jim up; would you felt better than what you do now? No, says I, I’d feel bad – I’d feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what’s the use of you learning to do right, when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn’t answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn’t bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time. (85)

In this earlier scene, Huck consider his emotional state, thinks of the alternative, and concludes that the consequences of moral and immoral decisions are the same. After the case of

Mary Jane, he sees a flaw in his earlier conclusion, and decides that perhaps honesty might sometimes be less troublesome than dishonesty. This reintroduces into his head the slim chance that a moral worldview might actually be valid. However, his final struggle demonstrates the reverse: in this case, “moral” behavior would lead to pain and “immoral” behavior to happiness.

After thinking about his experiences with Jim and the affection between them, which has increased since his first quandary, Huck says that he “never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t” (193).

The reason his decision is so pronouncedly final extends back to a pattern that began near the beginning of the book. Without companionship, left alone with Nature, Huck repeatedly mentions wishing he were dead. The first time, in his room, Tom Sawyer enters to cheer him up.

The second time, his discovery of Jim cheers him up. The third time, he is cheered when he finds them both at the Phelps’ farm. Even when he decides to escape confinement in Pap’s cabin, one reason is to escape the physical pain of Pap’s beatings, and the other is that Huck felt “dreadful lonesome” (24). In each case, feeling “lonesome” is extremely undesirable, and any sort of 6 companionship is an antidote. Hence, when offered the choice to give up companionship, Huck is being asked to give up the very thing that makes his life bearable. Huck is in “a tight place,” emotionally, the stakes are high, and he must do anything he can to survive lonesomeness, even if it means rejecting conventional morality and going to Hell.

The irony of Huck’s decision has several layers. The most obvious is that in choosing to do good, Huck thinks he is choosing evil. But more subtly, and quite tragically, by doing this good deed, according to his empirical method, Huck must abandon the moral worldview completely because it has been proven experimentally not to be universal. Huck cannot see the difference between the morality of Mary Jane and society’s morality, so he rejects all explicit forms of the Christian walk.9 Furthermore, he deeply entrenches his fatalistic mindset by scapegoating his upbringing as the reason he must reject morality. Huck has always seen himself as naturally “ignorant and so kind of low-down and ornery” (13). He stated at the beginning of his first moral quandrary: “I see it warn’nt no use for me to try to learn to do right; a body that don’t get started right when he’s little, ain’t got no show.” This has become a self-fulfilling prophecy that follows Huck wherever he goes. It is a self-imposed condemnation of every independent choice he makes. Because he sees himself as inherently low-down and society as morally elevated, Huck’s decision to go with his gut means embracing Pap and all the dark circumstances he believes comprise his character. Therefore, his incorrect empirical assessment and his fatalism lead to an ironic verbal rejection of the very things he is, in fact, showing through his actions: true morality and a naturally good heart.10

9 Burg, 44: According to Burg, Mary Jane is merely another reiteration of society’s general problem of only trusting in theoretical, proof-based knowledge, instead of the experiential wisdom derived from friendship. “Words for her at this point have no value outside an arithmetic function of proving, or adding up.” Despite her kindness, Mary Jane errs in the same way that the feuding Grangerfords do by looking at the face value of words rather than a deeper form of knowing that transcends language. 10 Boughn, 38-40. In conjunction with Boughn’s argument that all the characters Huck encounters are “strangers to themselves” due to their “sense coming unhinged or unjointed from words” my argument gains a layer of linguistic- 7

With Huck’s decision to reject Mary Jane’s moral faithfulness, all that is left for him to emulate is the specific virtue he noted in her: being “full of sand.” He states that he admires her bravery: “she’d take a job that was more nearer her size …She had the grit to pray for Judus if she took the notion - there warn’t no back-down to her, I judge” (173). The fact that he thought

Mary Jane capable of praying for the man who betrayed Jesus, someone irredeemable, shows that he specifically admires her ability to grapple directly with an impossible situation. His inability to discern the root cause of her confidence is fatal to Huck’s moral growth because, as far as he can tell, Tom’s confidence is analogical. Tom promises Jim that “we would see he got away, sure,” an expression of supreme and unfaltering confidence (223). Again, Huck’s narrative emphasis reveals some of his attitude. Huck is ever cautious, ever searching for the safest method, seeking to be unseen rather than seen, ever unsure. By contrast, Tom flamboyantly tumbles through a series of daring antics with complete, unswaying confidence, aiming to show off even more when his plans succeed. Tom reveals that he planned the Evasion to culminate in a triumphant parade of Jim into the town. Huck’s response shows that he does not understand

Tom’s goal enough to criticize it. He merely comments, “I reckoned it was about as well the way it was” 261. With no way to understand the difference in the principles that guide Tom and Mary

Jane, Huck simply sees the admirable similarities in their behavior and follows blindly.11

Locke is quite correct in stating that the novel ends “without the hero’s growth, education, and development” (85). After Jim reveals that Pap has been dead all along, Huck decides to light out for the Territory. The weather is fair, at least for the day, and Huck has an

based irony. Huck is a stranger to himself for the same reason but in a converse way. Rather than using society’s words to justify evil, he must use their words to condemn good. 11 Burg, 305: Burg agrees with Gullason’s opinion that Huck follows Tom “because of a complete faith in Tom’s ‘serious promise …” to help him free Jim. However, this places emphasis on their trusting relationship, rather than Huck’s a priori psychological reasons for trusting Tom. 8 opportunity, having escaped Pap for good, to also escape the society whose rules he has categorically rejected. The story is over. Huck thought it was not worth the trouble of writing, and he is moving on, continuing to follow his old ad hoc, experimental ways. Yet this very lack of moral development could be viewed as a heroic trait in an existential world. Huck’s awareness of the chaotic nature of the universe does not drown him in existential angst or dread. As far as it is in his power, Huck refuses to allow evil circumstances to affect his attitude. Rather than feeling trapped by circumstance, Huck embraces a fatalistic mindset that precludes any feelings of dissatisfaction, allowing him to be happy despite the purposelessness of his existence.12

Though Mary Jane’s world is fairer by far, it is not real to Huck. Twain leaves it up to the reader to decide if Huck’s existence is the happiest we can aspire to. The answer will depend on who is ultimately right – those who have faith in a higher power despite mankind’s evil and Nature’s volatility, or those who see the world as a place where “it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same” (85).

12 Bougn, 34-36: Boughn argues that it not fatalism, but skepticism, that allows “freedom from the world.” Locke argues there is no freedom, but only “cruel, deluded, childish ‘fun’ and games” (85). Burg argues that change is the closest humans can get to freedom. While disparate, these three conclusions all support a generally pessimistic reading of the novel’s ending. 9

Bibliography Boughn, Michael. "Rethinking Mark Twain’s Skepticism: Ways of Knowing and Forms of

Freedom in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of

American Literature, Culture, and Theory 52, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 31-48. Accessed

November 19, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.1996.0025

Burg, David F. "Another View of Huckleberry Finn." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 29, no. 3

(December 1974): 299-319. Accessed November 20, 2018.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2933172

Locke, Richard. “Mark Twain’s Free Spirits and Slaves: Huckleberry Finn’s Own Story.”

In Critical Children: The Use of Childhood in Ten Great Novels, 63-86. New York:

Columbia University Press, 2013.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008