Critical Controversy
Race and the Ending of
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Critical Standpoints
• Leo Marx, Justin Kaplan, David
L. Smith, and Shelly Fisher
Fishkin support Huckleberry
Finn as an anti-racist text.
• Julius Lester and Jane Smiley
argue that the conclusion of the
novel is evidence of Twain’s
racism.
• Toni Morrison reframes the
debate entirely.
Leo Marx
• Marx argues that the novel is
about Jim’s freedom, not Tom
and Huck’s games: “Yet along
with the idyllic and the epical and
the funny in Huckleberry Finn . . .
[this] is not a boy’s lark but a
quest for freedom.”
• Nevertheless, Marx deems the
conclusion a farce that
“jeopardizes the significance of
the entire novel.”
Shelly Fisher Fishkin
• Fisher Fishkin agrees with Marx
that the novel has a strong antiracist sentiment but disagrees
that the conclusion detracts from
the novel’s ultimate goals.
• She argues that the pranks Tom
plays on Jim at the end of the
novel are an allegory for Jim
Crow laws: “Is what America did
to the ex-slaves any less insane
than what Tom Sawyer put Jim
through in the novel?”
Justin Kaplan
• Twenty years after Huckleberry Finn was published, Twain
himself gave this summary of the book: “A sound heart and
a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience
suffers defeat.”
• Kaplan contends that “Huck’s
‘deformed conscience’ is the
internalized voice . . . of a
conventional wisdom that found
nothing wrong in the institution of
slavery,” and that Huck’s rejection of
this “deformed conscience” is what
makes him a hero with a “sound
heart.”
David L. Smith
• Smith argues that “‘Race’ is a strategy for
relegating a segment of the population to a
permanent inferior status. It functions by
insisting that each ‘race’ has specific,
definitive, inherent behavioral tendencies
and capacities which distinguish it from
other races.”
• Contrary to what would be expected from
such a social construction of race, Twain
“portrays Jim as a compassionate, shrewd,
thoughtful, self-sacrificing, and even wise
man. . . . Jim, in short, exhibits all the
qualities that ‘the Negro’ supposedly lacks.”
Julius Lester and Jane Smiley
• Lester: “It defies logic that Jim did not know Illinois was a
free state. . . . A century of readers have accepted this as
credible, a grim reminder of the abysmal feelings of
superiority with which whites are burdened.”
• Smiley: “Twain’s moral failure . . . is never even to
account for their choice to go down the river rather than
across it.”
Julius Lester and Jane Smiley
• Smiley condemns Twain for having
Jim prefer Huck’s companionship to
real freedom: “Twain thinks that
Huck’s affection is a good enough
reward for Jim.”
• Lester implicates not only Twain but
generations of white readers for
believing that Jim valued his
relationship with Huck over his own
freedom: “White people might want
to believe such fairy tales . . . but
blacks know better.”
Toni Morrison
• Twain’s novel has the “ability to transform its
contradictions into fruitful complexities and to seem to be
deliberately cooperating in the controversy it has excited.
The brilliance of Huckleberry Finn is that it is the
argument it raises.”
• “If the emotional environment
into which Twain places his
protagonist is dangerous, then
the leading question the novel
poses for me is, What does
Huck need to live without terror,
melancholy, and suicidal
thoughts? The answer, of
course, is Jim.”
Toni Morrison
• Twain leaves three issues unresolved in the novel:
– “Huck Finn’s estrangement, soleness and morbidity as an
outcast child
– the disproportionate sadness at the center of Jim’s and his
relationship
– the secrecy in which Huck’s engagement with (rather than
escape from) a racist society is necessarily conducted.”
Huck Finn and Uncle Tom’s
Cabin
• Kaplan: “Twain’s novel is probably more faithful as well
as less stereotypical than Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
beloved Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
• Smiley: The “portrayal of an array of thoughtful,
autonomous, and passionate black characters [in Uncle
Tom’s Cabin] leaves Huck Finn far behind.”
• Fisher Fishkin: “[T]he two books were written to achieve
two different ends. One was written to mobilize
sentiment against slavery. The other . . . to expose the
dynamics of racism.”
“Huck Finn.” Lithograph of a detail of the
mural in the Missouri State Capitol by
Thomas Hart Benton, 1936. (The Annotated
Huckleberry Finn, page xlvii)
“On the Raft” by Edward Winsor Kemble
“Jim and the Ghost” by Edward Winsor Kemble
(The Annotated Huckleberry Finn, page 85)
“Exploring the Cave” by Edward Winsor Kemble
(Norton Critical Edition of Huck Finn, page 59)
“In the Cave” by Edward Winsor Kemble (Norton
Critical Edition of Huck Finn, page 60)
“A Fair Fit” by Edward Winsor Kemble (Norton
Critical Edition of Huck Finn, page 66)
Anonymous, JIM CROW JUBILEE (1847)
“Jim and the Snake” by Edward Winsor Kemble
(Norton Critical Edition of Huck Finn, page 64)