More On Huck Finn In Approaching Its Last Part

11/11/17

More on Huck Finn for a sec.

In Chapter 32, Huckleberry winds up at the Phelps’s farm and takes on the identity of, first off, Tom, then in the forgivable crystallization of hard-to-believe fictional coincidence, Tom Sawyer. He keeps saying it’s easy to be Tom Sawyer and on learning that he is to be Tom Sawyer, Huck says, mild paraphrase, “I was glad to know who I am.” The references to identity are many in the Chapter.

My general idea is that all works of literature involve, maybe entail, a search for self, some searches more explicit than others. That idea is manifest in this novel. As Huck tries on various identities, as he symbolically keeps dying and arising anew, as he sheds what he tries on, as he must needs work past the likes of a Tom Sawyer to become free, as the themes of death and freedom thread through Huck Finn, so now, at the Phelps’s in planning and scheming wth Tom to free Jim, Huck’s smack in the middle of that working-past effort.

So I approach the last part of Huck Finn to test my reaction to it, to try to see whether, as has been said a lot, it comprises a cruel and disappointing anti climax after the idyllic heights Huck and Jim reach for a time or whether I can see in it scabrous indictment of what Huck comes finally to reject that is both thematically coherent and that doesn’t pit that thematic coherence against a feeling of frustration and let down, or, in a word or two, emotional incoherence.