1. life of twain mark the reasons and purposes of the topic main party

§3. “Huckleberry Finn”: main themes, motives, problems, language
The voice of Huck, the voice of the outsider, that begins to be heard at the end of Tom Sawyer takes over completely in what is without doubt Twain's greatest work, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, begun in 1876 and published in 1885. Twain began Huckleberry Finn simply as a sequel to Tom Sawyer, with several narrative threads carried over from the earlier work. Even as he began it, however, he must have realized that this was a very different, more authentic work. For the manuscript shows Twain trying to catch the trick, the exact lilt of Huck's voice. “You will not know about me,” the first try at an opening, is scratched out. So is the second try, “You do not know about me.” Only at the third attempt does Twain come up with the right, idiomatic but poetic, start: “You don't know about me.” Like a jazz musician, trying to hit the right beat before swinging into the full melody and the rhythm of the piece, Twain searches for just the right voice, the right pitch and momentum, before moving into the story of his greatest vernacular hero. The intimacy is vital, too: in a way that was to become characteristic of American fiction, the protagonist addresses “you” the reader directly, in terms that appear spontaneous, sincere, unpremeditated. We are drawn into this web of words in a manner that convinces us that we are enjoying an unpremeditated, vital relationship with the hero. The spontaneity is also a function of the narrative structure. Twain once said that he relied on a book to “write itself,” and that is the impression, in the best sense, given by Huckleberry Finn. The story has a structure, of course, that of the picaresque narrative (Don Quixote was one of Twain's favorite books), but that structure is as paradoxically structure less as the structure of, say, Moby-Dick or “Song of Myself.”
The book flows like the Mississippi, at a constantly altering pace, in unanticipated directions; new characters, episodes, incidents pop up without warning, old characters like Jim or Tom Sawyer reappear just when we least expect them to. Like the great works of Melville and Whitman, too, Huckleberry Finn remains an open field, describing an open, unstructured and unreconstructed spirit. It does not conclude, in any conventional fashion. Famously, it ends as “Song of Myself” does and many later American narratives were to do: looking to the open road, with the hero still breaking away - or, as Huck himself has it, ready to “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest.”
Twain later described Huckleberry Finn as “a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers a defeat.” The central moral dilemma Huck has to face, in this deeply serious, even tragic comedy, is whether or not he should betray his friend, the escaped slave Jim, by revealing Jim's whereabouts to other whites, including Miss Watson, his owner. For much of the narrative, Huck is equivocal. Sometimes he sees Jim as a slave, as property that should be returned; and sometimes he sees him as a human being and a friend, requiring his sympathy and help. And the vacillation stems from Huck's uncertainty over what takes priority: the laws of society, his social upbringing which, however patchily, has shaped his conscience, or the promptings of his own heart, his instincts and feelings as an individual. The book is about the historical injustice of slavery, of course, and the social inequity of racism, the human use or denial of human beings.
But it is also about the same fundamental conflict. Huck must choose between the law and liberty, the sanctions of the community and the perceptions of the individual, civil and natural justice. He chooses the latter, the lessons learned from his own experience, the knowledge of his own rebellious heart. In doing so, Huck reflects his creator's belief at the time in aboriginal innocence, the purity of the asocial - and asocial or presocial creatures like the child. And he also measures the extent of the creative triumph, since Twain manages here a miracle: that rare thing, a sympathetic and credibly virtuous character. The sympathy and credibility stem from the same source: Huck is a grotesque saint, a queer kind of savior because he does not know he is doing good. His notions of right and wrong, salvation and damnation, have been formed by society. So, when he is doing good he believes that he is doing evil, and vice versa. His belief system is at odds with his right instincts; hence, the terms in which he describes his final decision not to betray Jim. “All right, then,” Huck declares, “I'll go to hell.”
Twain's strategies for shifting Huck's conflict from the personal to the mythic are several. Easily the most important, though, is his own, almost certainly intuitive,variation on the contrast between the clearing and the wilderness: the riverbank and the river. The riverbank is the fixed element, the clearing, the community. On the riverbank, everyone plays a social role, observes a social function; either without knowing it. Everyone is obsessed with appearances and disguises, and uses language to conceal meaning and feeling from others and themselves. Everyone behaves like an actor who has certain lines to say, clothes to wear, things to do, rather than as an independent individual. It is a mark of Huck's individuality, incidentally, that, on the riverbank, he is constantly forgetting the role he is playing, who he is supposed to be. Everyone, in short, denies their essential humanity on the riverbank, and the humanity of others: here, Jim is not a human being, he is the lowest form of social function, a slave. What adds to the power of this portrait is that, as with the account of the Puritan settlement in The Scarlet Letter, it is simultaneously mythic and historical. This is society, the machinery of the social system seen from the standpoint of individualism. It is also a very specific society, that of the South before the Civil War. Drawing on the devices of the Southwestern humorists, but exponentially developing them, Twain offers a brilliantly detailed satirical picture of the Old South: poor whites like Pap Finn and the people of Bricksville, middle-class farmers like the Phelps family, wealthy planters like the Grangerfords - and, of course, the slaves.
But it is also a satire on one particular kind of social “style” that Twain knew only too well. It is a tragic account of what, generally, happens when people stop seeing and testing things for themselves, as individual human beings. But it also a very American tragedy about a moment in American history when a sense of humanity and individuality was lost, with terrible consequences for the nation.
The river, the fluid element and the medium for escape for Huck and Jim, is, of course, Twain's version of the mythic wilderness. It is a place where Huck can enjoy intimacy with Jim and an almost Edenic harmony with nature. Recasting Huck as an American Adam, Twain shows his hero attending to the moods of the river and its surroundings and, in turn, projecting his own moods in and through those natural surrounds. Huck appears to enjoy a separate peace here on the river, a world apart from rules, codes, and clock time, where “lazying” becomes a positive activity. Free from the post lapsarian compulsion to work, Huck can simply be and wonder: live, meditate, and marvel at the miracle of the particular, the minutiae of life. It is in these episodes on the river that the indelible connection between the voice of Huck and his values becomes clear. Huck scrupulously, instinctively tells it as it is. He sees things as they are, free of social pretence or disguise. He describes things as they are, not cloaked in the rhetoric of society. So he can judge things as they are, not as the social system would tell him to judge them. It is also in these episodes that Huck's power as a syncretic figure becomes clear. Huck Finn brings together and synthesizes the warring opposites of Twain's earlier work. Huck is a focus for all his creator's nostalgia, all his yearnings for childhood, the lost days of his youth, the days before the Civil War and the Fall; and he is also, quite clearly, a projection of Twain's more progressive feelings, the belief in human development and perfectibility - he suggests hope for the future as well as love of the past. Again, this is measured in the language of the book, in that it is precisely Huck's “progressive” attention to the use and function of things that gives his observations such color and immediacy. His words do not deny the beauty of things: the glory and splendor, say, of a sunrise on the Mississippi River. But neither do they deny that things are there for a purpose. On the contrary, they acknowledge that each particular detail of a scene or moment has a reason for being there, deserves and even demands recording; and they derive their grace and force from that acknowledgment. The language Huck is given, in short, is at once exact and evocative, pragmatic and poetic: it reveals things as they are, in all their miraculous particularity. And Huck himself, the speaker of that language, comes across as a profoundly realistic and romantic figure: a pragmatist and a dreamer, a simple figure and a noble man - a perfect gentle knight, who seems honorable, even chivalric, precisely because he sticks closely to the facts.
As many commentators have observed, the last few chapters do represent a decline - or, to use Hemingway's more dismissive phrase, “just cheating” - in the sense that Huck is pushed to one side of the action, and Tom Sawyer is permitted to take over and reduce the issue of Jim's slavery to the level of farce. For all Huck's occasional protests at Tom's behavior, or his famous final declaration of independence, the comedy loses its edge, the moral problems are minimized, and the familiar divisions in Twain's writing begin to reappear. There are many possible reasons for this, but one possible one is that Twain was perhaps beginning to have doubts about the effectiveness and viability of his hero.