Against the Bildungsroman Reading of Huckleberry Finn

Introduction: Huck Finn and the Crucial Inversion

The character of Huck Finn is built upon the idea of the crucial inversion, a device that Mark Twain develops at every turn of the novel. In the opening chapters, Huck is meant to be civilized by Miss Watson — but instead he is climbing out the window to play at being pirates with Tom. When Pap arrives, Huck is supposed to hand over the money he won in the previous book, but money means nothing to Huck, so it remains in the hands of the Judge, who refuses to give it to Pap. When Huck runs away from Pap, he teams up with Jim, the runaway slave — and instead of turning Jim in to the authorities, he helps to hide him. There are moments of a "crisis" of conscience in which Huck believes he is doing wrong but is actually doing right: an inversion within an inversion. Even at the end of the novel, when Huck is supposed to be more mature and more in command of his surroundings — and therefore easily capable of freeing Jim from the Phelps farm — he hands over control to Tom Sawyer, who has just arrived.

Leo Marx criticizes this ending as unrealistic given what Huck has experienced and how he has ostensibly come of age. But the ending is entirely consistent with Twain's overall aim: to make Huck the embodiment of the crucial inversion — a principle by which Huck always does the opposite of what he ought to do, or of what we expect him to do — and is usually right to do so. The purpose of this essay is to examine where and why Marx's argument against the novel fails.

Marx's Quest-Narrative Reading and Its Limits

While Marx sees the novel as a quest or bildungsroman in which Huck is meant to grow and mature, Twain approaches it from a comedic angle — even as he inserts moments of agonizing realism and profundity. The pivot upon which the book turns is the comedic juxtaposition of Huck against the world, of Huck and Tom against common sense, and of Huck against "civilization." Since Huck has "been there before," there is no need for him to see it all again — which is precisely why he sets out for the territory ahead at the novel's close. If this were a journey in Marx's sense, the novel would conclude decisively rather than remaining so open-ended, with Huck's continued defiance of convention still intact.

Marx wants the novel to be other than what it is. He misinterprets Twain's use of the crucial inversion as a plot device and instead mischaracterizes it as a structural mistake. He wants the story to be a journey — but it is not, and Twain asserts as much in his prefatory note, where he tells the reader there is no plot whatsoever to the novel.

Huck as Ironic Character: The Comedy of Self-Ignorance

The irony that Twain wishes the reader to enjoy is that his hero, Huck Finn, is unable to perceive his own virtue. Marx wants Huck to be a character who grows and comes of age, but for this to be true, Huck would have to arrive at some form of self-knowledge — which he ultimately never does. He is thoroughly committed to judging himself by the conventional standards of his time and constantly finding himself wanting, unhappily resigned to that verdict: "All right, then, I'll go to hell," Huck says after deciding not to turn Jim in — an act he believes will cost him his soul (Twain, p. 217). For Twain, this is high comedy, rich with irony. Huck is, at root, an ironic character who is entirely unaware of being so.

Apparently Marx is equally unaware of this. He is not content to appreciate that in spite of everything — Tom included — Huck is still a boy trying to help a fugitive slave to freedom, and that this alone is enough to win the reader's admiration.

Conclusion: Innocence, Not Growth, as Twain's Truth

Thus, to summarize, Marx conceptualizes Huck's journey as a quest, which leads him to the position of arguing that Twain could not "acknowledge the truth his novel contained." However, viewed from the simple perspective of character, it becomes clear that for Twain the "truth" amounted to nothing more than a boy perceiving slavery as morally wrong and involving himself in a quest for freedom. That freedom should ultimately come from the Widow Douglas rather than from Huck is entirely in keeping with the novel's logic — after all, it was the Widow who took Huck in at the close of Tom Sawyer, and it is the same woman who now lets both Huck and Jim go free.

References

Marx, L. (1953). Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling, and "Huckleberry Finn." The American Scholar, 423–440.

Twain, M. (1915). The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Hayes Barton Press.