Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 227respectable, you know,” he tells his friend, Huck Finn. That this attempt to resolve
the divisions of the narrative is less than successful is evident from the fact that Tom
Sawyer, like Life on the Mississippi, is interesting precisely because of its discontinuity.
It is also implicit in the author’s intuitively right decision to give equal weight at the
end of the story to the voice of the outlaw, Huck, as he tries to resist Tom’s persuasions.
“It ain’t for me; I ain’t used to it,” Huck tells Tom: “It’s awful to be tied up so.”
The voice of Huck, the voice of the outsider, that begins to be heard at the end
of Tom Sawyer takes over completely in what is without doubt Twain’s greatest work,
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, begun in 1876 and published in 1885. Twain
began Huckleberry Finn simply as a sequel to Tom Sawyer, with several narrative
threads carried over from the earlier work. Even as he began it, however, he must
have realized that this was a very different, more authentic work. For the manuscript
shows Twain trying to catch the trick, the exact lilt of Huck’s voice. “You will
not know about me,” the first try at an opening, is scratched out. So is the second try,
“You do not know about me.” Only at the third attempt does Twain come up with
the right, idiomatic but poetic, start: “You don’t know about me.” Like a jazz musi-
cian, trying to hit the right beat before swinging into the full melody and the rhythm
of the piece, Twain searches for just the right voice, the right pitch and momentum,
before moving into the story of his greatest vernacular hero. The intimacy is vital,
too: in a way that was to become characteristic of American fiction, the protagonist
addresses “you” the reader directly, in terms that appear spontaneous, sincere,
unpremeditated. We are drawn into this web of words in a manner that convinces
us that we are enjoying an unpremeditated, vital relationship with the hero. The
spontaneity is also a function of the narrative structure. Twain once said that he relied
on a book to “write itself,” and that is the impression, in the best sense, given by
Huckleberry Finn. The story has a structure, of course, that of the picaresque narrative
(Don Quixote was one of Twain’s favorite books), but that structure is as paradoxically
structureless as the structure of, say, Moby-Dick or “Song of Myself.” The book flows
like the Mississippi, at a constantly altering pace, in unanticipated directions; new
characters, episodes, incidents pop up without warning, old characters like Jim or Tom
Sawyer reappear just when we least expect them to. Like the great works of Melville
and Whitman, too, Huckleberry Finn remains an open field, describing an open,
unstructured and unreconstructed spirit. It does not conclude, in any conventional
fashion. Famously, it ends as “Song of Myself ” does and many later American narra-
tives were to do: looking to the open road, with the hero still breaking away – or, as
Huck himself has it, ready to “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest.”
Twain later described Huckleberry Finn as “a book of mine where a sound heart
and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers a defeat.” The
central moral dilemma Huck has to face, in this deeply serious, even tragic comedy,
is whether or not he should betray his friend, the escaped slave Jim, by revealing
Jim’s whereabouts to other whites, including Miss Watson, his owner. For much of
the narrative, Huck is equivocal. Sometimes he sees Jim as a slave, as property that
should be returned; and sometimes he sees him as a human being and a friend,
requiring his sympathy and help. And the vacillation stems from Huck’s uncertaintyGGray_c03.indd 227ray_c 03 .indd 227 8 8/1/2011 7:54:18 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 18 AM