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Applied scientific principles of objectivity and
detachment to the study of human beings.
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Influenced by Darwinism (natural selection) and
psychology (Freud)
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Posited that men were governed by heredity and
environment.
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Often depict man in conflict with nature,
society, or himself.
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Prominent from 1880-1920(ish)
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
--Stephen Crane (1894, 1899)
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Themes: survival, determinism, and taboo issues
Conflict: man versus nature, man versus self
Characters struggle against pressures that threaten to
release the “brute within.”
Characters struggle to control their lives in the face of
overwhelming forces (nature, society, heredity, luck).
Humans unable to stand up and overpower these forces.
Nature/Society/Heredity/Genetics is an indifferent or
antagonistic force acting on the lives of human beings.
TOWN OF CAIRO DESTROYED
AFTER THE FLOOD OF 2011
I passed the line around one of them [small trees] right on the
edge of the cut bank, but there was a stiff current, and the raft
come booming down so lively she tore it out by the roots and
away she went. I see the fog closing down, and it made me so sick
and scared I couldn’t budge for most a half a minute it seemed to
me—and then there warn’t no raft in sight; you couldn’t see twenty
yards. I jumped into the canoe and run back to the stern, and
grabbed the paddle and set her back a stroke. But she didn’t come.
I was in such a hurry I hadn’t untied her. I got up and tried to
untie her, but I was so excited my hands shook so I couldn’t hardly
do anything with them.
-- Chapter 15, 2nd paragraph
I kept quiet, with my ears cocked, about fifteen minutes, I reckon.
I was floating along, of course, four or five miles an hour; but you
don’t ever think of that. No, you feel like you are laying dead still
on the water; and if a little glimpse of a snag slips by you don’t
think to yourself how fast you’re going, but you catch your breath
and think, my! how that snag’s tearing along. If you think it ain’t
dismal and lonesome out in a fog that way by yourself in the night,
you try it once—you’ll see.
-- Chapter 15, 9th paragraph
We went drifting down into a big bend, and the night clouded up
and got hot. The river was very wide, and was walled with solid
timber on both sides; you couldn’t see a break in it hardly ever, or
a light. We talked about Cairo, and wondered whether we would
know it when we got to it. I said likely we wouldn’t, because I had
heard say there warn’t but about a dozen houses there, and if they
didn’t happen to have them lit up, how was we going to know we
was passing a town? Jim said if the two big rivers joined together
there, that would show. But I said maybe we might think we was
passing the foot of an island and coming into the same old river
again. That disturbed Jim—and me too… [Jim] said he’d be
mighty sure to see it, because he’d be a free man the minute he
seen it, but if he missed it he’d be in slave country again and no
more show for freedom
• In Huck and Jim’s inability to control their
circumstances, what do you think Twain notes about
America and the ability to achieve equality and move
past the degradations of slavery?
• What other points/incidents in the book connect to
the unpredictability of nature and society?
• How does this unpredictability impact Huck and Jim?
Emotionally, psychologically, relationally (in terms of
their relationship), etc.?
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The swell of immigrants in the latter half of the
19th century, which led to a larger lower class and
increased poverty in the cities
The prominence of psychology and the theories of
Sigmund Freud
Pessimism in the wake of the Civil War and
Reconstruction
Publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species
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Huck as 1st person narrator
Huck as a tabula rasa or
blank slate –
a concept in which
philosophers describe the
human mind before societal
ideas have been imprinted
on it.
It most froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn’t ever dared to talk
such talk in his life before. Just see what a difference it made in him
the minute he judged he was about free. It was according to the old
saying, “Give a nigger an inch and he’ll take an ell.” Thinks I, this is
what comes of my not thinking. Here was this nigger, which I had
as good as helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and
saying he would steal his children—children that belonged to a man I
didn’t even know; a man that hadn’t ever done me no harm.
-- chapter 16, 7th paragraph
They went off and I got aboard the raft, feeling
bad and low, because I knowed very well I had done
wrong, and I see it warn’t no use for me to try to learn to do right; a body
that don’t get started right when he’s little ain’t got no show—when the
pinch comes there ain’t nothing to back him up and keep him to his
work, and so he gets beat. Then I thought a minute, and says to myself,
hold on; s’pose you’d a done right and give Jim up, would you felt better
than what you do now? No, says I, I’d feel bad—I’d feel just the same
way I do now. Well, then, says I, what’s the use you learning to do right
when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and
the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn’t answer that. So I
reckoned I wouldn’t bother no more about it, but after this always do
whichever come handiest at the time.
-- chapter 16, about five pages into the chapter
Once I said to myself it would be a thousand times better for Jim
to be a slave at home where his family was, as long as he’d got to be a
slave, and so I’d better write a letter to Tom Sawyer and tell him to
tell Miss Watson where he was. But I soon give up that notion for
two things: she’d be mad and disgusted at his rascality and ungratefulness
for leaving her, and so she’d sell him straight down the river
again; and if she didn’t, everybody naturally despises an ungrateful
nigger, and they’d make Jim feel it all the time, and so he’d feel
ornery and disgraced. And then think of me! It would get all around
that Huck Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom…
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.
It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I
let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming…
-- chapter 31, about three pages into the chapter
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Hemingway said, “All modern American literature
comes from one book by Mark Twain called
Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that.
There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”
Many writers also claim that Huck’s story is the story of America.
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Do you agree or disagree with these writers? Do you see anything of
America’s story through Huck and Jim’s lives together on the raft?
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What do you think Twain is criticizing about America? What do you think
he is celebrating? Do you think the story is mostly optimistic or mostly
pessimistic?
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Using Huck and Jim’s journey/relationship as a model, what might be the
solution to racism and bigotry? What stands in the way?
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Which characters do you feel are the moral heroes? Which ones are the
moral villains?