It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let
them stay said; and 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. (201)With this climactic self-deprecation, the bonding unreliability, begun in the
first paragraph, reaches its apex. While Huck is sure that he’s damned, Twain’s
rhetorical readers are even more certain that he is saved. These judgments
depend on inferring both that Huck is absolutely sincere in his view of himself
and that he is misevaluating the ethics of his choice.
Attention to Twain’s use of different subtypes of bonding unreliability also
sheds light on the controversy about the ending of Huckleberry Finn. Although
Twain continues to employ bonding unreliability through Huck’s naïve defa-
miliarizations of Tom Sawyer’s elaborate schemes, Twain does not continue
with the pattern of bonding through sincere self-deprecation. Instead, Huck
passively accepts most of Tom’s schemes and their casual cruelty toward Jim.
In other words, Twain employs bonding unreliability for Huck as misreader,
but he does not employ it in relation to Huck as an ethical evaluator. Thus,
the unreliability during the Evasion both maintains and closes perceptual dis-
tance, but with respect to Huck’s treatment of Jim, it does not close any signifi-
cant ethical distance. Indeed, Huck’s failure to evaluate the ethical problems
with Tom’s treatment of Jim provides such a sharp contrast to the bonding
effect of the sincere but misguided self-deprecation in chapter 31 that it pro-
vides good grounds for the complaints of many readers, rhetorical and oth-
erwise, that the Evasion is a serious flaw in the novel’s design. I will return to
this point when I discuss deficient narration in the next chapter.
The fifth subtype of bonding unreliability is what I call partial progress
toward the norm. This subtype typically occurs along either the axis of ethics/
evaluation or along that of understanding/perception. Stevens’s comment that
“in bantering lies the key to human warmth” is one example of this subtype.
Another is this passage from Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.
That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You
never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the
first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gra-
tuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed
you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill
you. (327)108 • CHAPTER 5