audiences are willing to overlook the implausibility because doing so enables
that entertainment. But Twain also uses the passage for his initial character-
ization of Jim, and, indeed, that goal guides the rest of his choices in the nar-
ration. This prolepsis is the first time in the novel that Huck is not himself an
actor in the events, and Twain designs Huck’s narration so that Jim is front
and center. Furthermore, the passage goes a long way toward characterizing
him: he has an active imagination, he stands out among the other slaves, and
he is an extremely proud man. In addition, Jim is remarkably and intuitively
resourceful: he takes the events of falling asleep and waking up to find his
hat hung on a tree limb and a five-cent piece on the kitchen table and parlays
them into the means to elevate his status among his fellow slaves. Finally,
Twain shows that Jim believes in a supernatural realm that is different from,
although somewhat related to, the supernatural realm of the Christianity that
the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson have been trying to teach Huck. By
allowing himself these implausibilities, Twain establishes Jim as a remarkable
and arresting man, one whom Huck is then very fortunate to meet up with
on Jackson’s Island. The audience’s understanding of Jim’s character in turn
informs their judgments about Huck’s responses to Jim throughout their rela-
tionship, especially when Huck treats him as an object of fun and when Huck
makes his decision to go to hell rather than send Jim back to slavery.
This analysis provides a good backdrop for my next step of proposing
seven reasons why readers are not likely to notice Twain’s departure into
implausible narration until some close-reading, probability-obsessed narra-
tive theorist points it out. Each reason is tied to the experience of reading,
which is to say that each has some roots in the actual and authorial audi-
ence’s unfolding responses to the progression—though as I noted above, these
responses do not themselves shape the construction of the passage. I shall dub
the seven reasons the five Rules and two Meta-Rules of Thumb (that is, ten-
dencies or even conventions but not laws) about Readerly Engagement with
Breaks from the Dominant System of Probability. The two Meta-Rules under-
lie the five Rules and, applying Phelan’s Shaver (see the preface), they are the
most important ones to remember. But the five Rules offer a deeper dive into
the particular ways authors use resources to guide audiences’ responses to
deviations from strict probability.
(1) The passage is relatively brief, and thus suggests the Rule of Duration:
the briefer the break, the less likely audiences will notice it; the more extended
the break, the more likely audiences will notice it.^10
- One important qualification here: sometimes a break can extend for such a long dura-
tion and be so compelling that readers (a) accept it as the new normal and (b) focus their atten-
tion on what is being disclosed rather than on the break that makes the disclosure possible.
AUDIENCES AND PROBABLE IMPOSSIBILITIES • 47