Realism and Morality in Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Introduction: More Than a Teenage Adventure

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn carries far greater moral and educational meaning than a simple teenage adventure story. The simplicity of its plot and the events described in the book may appear routine for provincial Southern life in the mid-nineteenth century. In reality, however, the problems it touches are deeper and more wide-ranging, as they refer to nearly every sphere of society during that epoch.

It is difficult to think of another writer who managed to present such a complete encyclopedia of American life in the 1840s and 1850s within a single novel. Mark Twain succeeded in depicting the conflict between the individual and society, the institution of slavery, the immorality and bigotry of so-called "civilized" society, the religious, philistine, and racial prejudices of Southerners, and the problems of education and progress in the face of conservatism in the minds of ordinary people.

Moreover, his realism is unique and genuine, as he gives the narration to the main character himself — Huck Finn. As noted by L. Champion: "If the story of the narrative present is, then, as I have said it is, the story of Huck Finn's setting out to tell the truth, finding that he is not permitted that luxury, sensing that life itself had played him for a fool at a moment when he had thought he had been most conscientious, and becoming finally a teller of the tall tale, it is important to remember also that Mark Twain had his own tall tale to tell. He warned us in his published notice: Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." (Champion, Laurie. The Critical Response to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Greenwood Press, 1991, p. 140.)

Realism, Dialect, and Social Portraiture

The language used in the novel fully reflects the cultural and linguistic particularities of the era — often ungrammatical and filled with local Southern dialects. The use of dialect, however, attaches significance to the social status, beliefs, and moral qualities of the characters. Pap's words about African Americans reflect the common attitudes of white people, who did not even consider enslaved people to be human beings — only labor units, nothing more:

"Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. There was a free nigger there, from Ohio — they said he was a p-fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain't the wust. They said he could vote, when he was at home — they told me there was a State in this country where they'd let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I'll never vote agin." (Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, p. 20.)

Jim's dialect is typical of a Southern enslaved person — an uneducated and oppressed individual whose role was to obey his masters. Yet the achievement of Twain's realism lies in his depiction of Jim as a real personality: a virtuous and decent person, and in some ways a realization of folk wisdom. Twain depicted him as fully human — arguably the most complete personality in the novel:

"When Fitzgerald said that Huck's 'eyes were the first eyes that ever looked at us objectively that were not eyes from overseas,' he was undoubtedly referring to European eyes... European critics scorned not only the roughness, rudeness, and vulgarity in the United States, but indicted the hypocrisy in a nation that professed democracy and practiced slavery. Europeans were not, however, the first to see Euro-Americans objectively. Among those who preceded them were Africans and African Americans, whose objectivity, uncompromised by preconceptions of dark-skinned peoples, is recorded in a variety of forms, including the slave narratives, which were first published in the latter part of the eighteenth century." (Mensh, Elaine. Black, White, and Huckleberry Finn: Re-Imagining the American Dream. University of Alabama Press, 2000, p. 34.)

Huck's Moral Journey and the Escape from Social Slavery

For Huck Finn, a fourteen-year-old boy, it is quite a dilemma: whether to accept Jim as a human being and a friend, or to follow the norms of Southern society and return Jim to his slave owners. For Huck, the journey down the Mississippi River is an escape from moral slavery — a bondage resulting from his relationship with society — and this escape is primarily about moral choices. For Jim, by contrast, it is a question of life and death, as he seeks physical freedom and recognition of his humanity.

Huck's moral achievement is that he learned to distinguish right from wrong, virtue from evil, and hypocrisy from sincerity. Having lived most of his life in isolation, he was able to remain a kind of tabula rasa, largely unmarked by society's stamp on his soul. His philistine and narrow-minded commentaries about the people around him reveal not his own views so much as the views of Southern society in general. As one critic observes:

"In other words, Samuel Clemens, a cynical adult male, employs a character distinctly unlike — and more likable than — himself in order to relate his unforgiving criticism of inescapable and very human foibles. Huck has no life of his own at these moments, and the book becomes about Samuel Clemens's self-righteous anger, rather than the odyssey of a boy into mature adolescence." (O'Connor, William Van. "Why Huckleberry Finn Is Not the Great American Novel." College English, XVIII, October 1965, pp. 6–10.)

Huck does not have a settled point of view; he is genuinely confused about what to do with Jim. The decision to return Jim to slavery would mean submitting to society's norms and placing himself in the very moral slavery from which he is trying to escape. Neither Huck nor Jim has any personal stake in their journey on the raft down the Mississippi beyond this. Their mutual decision to embark on the escapade is driven by a universal human need for freedom — not by personal profit or the desire to flee hardship. There is no romantic hope for a happy life, freedom won through triumph, or material reward; it is simply an aspiration to feel free and to be liberated. Each of them understands freedom differently, but in general their aspirations share much in common and are intertwined throughout the novel.

This model of plot makes the novel genuinely realistic and strips away anything resembling romanticism — indeed, it amounts to a satire on romanticism and a critique of it. Tom Sawyer's romantic ideas about being pirates and knights, robbing Arabian merchants, and kidnapping beautiful ladies turn out in practice to be nothing more than foolish boyish games. Twain sets Tom Sawyer against Huck Finn, who is more practical and possessed of greater common sense — even though he is a simple orphan boy who lacked basic education and parental care. As critics have noted of Tom: "he is after all a village boy, nephew of the respectable Aunt Polly, brother of the model prig Sid Sawyer; Tom shares their status, and to him Huck is a 'romantic outcast.' Therefore Tom will never share Huck's secret wisdom — or his freedom." (Daniel G. Hoffman, "Black Magic — and White — in Huckleberry Finn," in Mark Twain: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Henry Nash Smith. Prentice-Hall, 1963, p. 101.)

Conclusion: Progress in the Minds of People

Relations between Jim and Huck, and the whole scope of events and experiences that took place on their journey toward freedom, show that people of different social groups are more than capable of living in harmony and mutual understanding. There is little that truly separates Blacks and whites — perhaps only the educational deprivation imposed on the latter — but nothing more fundamental. As the novel demonstrates, universal human values triumph over the narrow-minded outlooks of society, because virtues matter more than any mercantile or material ideal.