Huck and Jim form a “community of saints.” (LT 329)
“Responsibility is the very essence of [Huck’s] character.” (LT 330)
“The satiric brilliance of [Huck’s decision to help Jim escape] lies, of
course, in Huck’s solving his problem not by doing ‘right’ but by doing
‘wrong.’” (LT 332)
Huck Finn is “universal,” “local,” and “particular.” (LT 333)
“The style of [Huck Finn]…is not less than definitive in American
literature.” (LT 335)
Huck Finn is “a hymn to an older America forever gone.” (LT 334)
Huck Finn is “one of the world’s great books and one of the central
documents of American culture.” (LT 327)
“No one, as he well knew, sets a higher value on truth than a boy.” (LT
327)
“There are few other books which we can know so young and love so
long.” (LT 328)
“Huck Finn is a great book because it is about a god.” (LT 328)
“[The Tom Sawyer chapters are] rather mechanical [developments] of
an idea, and yet some device is needed to permit Huck to return to his
anonymity, to give up the role of hero, to fall into the background which
he prefers, for he is modest in all things and could not well endure the
attention and glamour which attend a hero at a book’s end.” (LT 335)
“There is more to be learned about the American character from [Huck
Finn’s] canonization than through its canonization.” (JS 62)
“Huck is just a boy trying to survive. The villain here is Mark Twain,
who knew how to give Huck a voice but didn’t know how to give him a
novel.” (JS 62)
“It is [with the feud between the Grangerfords and the Sheapersons] that
the novel begins to fail, because from here on the episodes are mere
distractions from the true subject of the work: Huck’s affection for and
responsibility to Jim.” (JS 62)
“…Neither Huck nor Twain takes Jim’s desire for freedom at all
seriously.” (JS 63)
“Twain really saw Jim as no more than Huck’s sidekick...” (JS 63)
“No matter how often the critics ‘place in context’ Huck’s use of the
word ‘nigger,’ they can never excuse or fully hide the deeper racism of
the novel- the way Twain and Huck use Jim because they really don’t
care enough about his desire for freedom to let that desire change their
plans.” (JS 64)
“Because the Ohio was not Twain’s territory, the fulfillment of Jim’s
wish would necessarily lead the novel away from the artistic integrity
that Twain certainly sensed his first four hundred pages possessed.”
(JS 62)
“The very heart of nineteenth-century American experience and
literature, the nature and meaning of slavery, is finally what Twain
cannot face in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” (JS 66)
“[T.S.] Eliot... [elevated] Huck to The Boy, and the Mississippi to the
River God, therein finding the sort of mythic resonance that he
admired.” (JS 62)
“When the Duke and the Dauphin finally betray Jim by selling him for
forty dollars, Huck is shocked, but the fact is neither he nor Twain has
come up with a plan that would have saved Jim in the end.” (JS 63)
“Considerable critical ink has flowed over the years in an attempt to
integrate the Tom Sawyer chapters with the rest of the book, but it has
flowed in vain.” (JS 63)
“I don’t think you can read it as anything other than satire, but it’s very
subtle.” (Hotchkiss)
“Tom’s return allows Twain the opportunity to satirize the Romantic
world view in juxtaposition with Huck’s Realism.” (Roets)
“Everyone now agrees that Huckleberry Finn is a masterpiece…”
(LM 350-351)
“To bring Huckleberry Finn to a satisfactory close, Clemens had to do
more than find a neat device for ending a story. His problem, though it
may never have occurred to him, was to invent an action capable of
placing in focus the meaning of the journey down the Mississippi.”
(LM 351-352)
“…the ending of Huckleberry Finn makes so many readers uneasy
because they rightly sense that it jeopardizes the significance of the
entire novel.” (LM 352)
“Humor in this novel flows from a bright joy of life as remote from our
world as living on a raft.” (LM 352)
“…theirs is not a boy’s lark but a quest for freedom.” (LM 352)
“Huck knows that the journey will have been a failure unless it takes Jim
to freedom. It is true that we do discover, in the end, that Jim is free, but
we also find out that the journey was not the means by which he finally
reached freedom.” (LM 353)
“Miss Watson, in short, is the Enemy…she exhibits all the outstanding
traits of the valley society. “ (LM 353)
“The ending, one might contend, is simply a burlesque upon Tom’s taste
for literary romance.” (LM 354)
“Huckleberry Finn is a masterpiece because it brings Western humor to
perfection and yet transcends the narrow limits of its conventions. But
the ending does not.” (LM 354)
“On the raft he (Jim) was an individual, man enough to denounce Huck
when Huck made him the victim of a practical joke. In the closing
episode, however, we lose sight of Jim in the maze of farcical invention.
He ceases to be a man.” (LM 356)
“The unhappy truth about the ending of Huckleberry Finn is that the
author, having revealed the tawdry nature of the culture of the great
valley, yielded to its essential complacency.” (LM 357)
“But one mark of Clemens’ genius is his deft presentation of the
disparity between what people do when they behave as individuals and
what they do when forced into roles imposed upon them by society.”
(LM 360)
“For freedom in this book specifically means freedom from society and
its imperatives.” (LM 361)
“Yet freedom, in the ecstatic sense that Huck and Jim knew it aboard the
raft, was hardly to be had in the Mississippi Valley in the 1840s, or, for
that matter in any other known human society.” (LM 362)
“But whatever the explanation, the faint hearted ending of The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remains an important datum in the
record of American thought and imagination.” (LM 364)
“For Huck Finn’s besetting problem, the disparity between his best
impulses and the behavior the community attempted to impose upon
him, is as surely ours as it was Twain’s.” (LM 364)
“[Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a] book of mine where a sound heart
and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers
defeat.” (Twain, Notebook 35)
“As for the ‘evasion’ chapters…recent analysis has been
more respectful, perceiving a grand design; The chapters
are, for instance, an allegory of torments visited on former
slaves during the post Reconstruction era in which Mark
Twain wrote” (Powers 477)
“HF is… : castigated as ‘trash’ of varying categories; banned
periodically; yet constantly reemerging to seduce the respectable folk; to
break the rules and defy anyone to make something of it; to flaunt its
capricious shifts of tone and mood and plot; to blow its outlaw jazz riffs
of spoken language; and , finally , to stand immutable as a moral
touchstone of the American saga by its simple offer to go to hell.”
(Powers 494)