A Second Look at Comedy in Twain

The cumulative impact of over 100 years of critical acclaim makes the literary reputation of an acknowledged masterpiece such as Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” seem impregnable. Twain’s classic book elevates the form of the picaresque novel into a story of individual freedom as Huck Finn and the escaped slave Jim row down the Mississippi River liberated from the constraints and judgments of society. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is undoubtedly a classic of American literature, but too often literary scholarship tries to defend every aspect of a masterpiece as a successful aesthetic decision of the author. Sometimes reading a novel afresh, years after its publication, reveals flaws that the literary world has learned to overlook.

Twain’s classic offers a medley of colorful characters, memorably presented by his irreverent narrator. Although Huck presents each new figure with a keen eye for the ridiculous, Huck himself is a shifting comedic persona rather than a genuine, grounded character. His personality and world view changes to fit each scene, allowing him to effectively satirize any given situation. Although Huck often seems implausibly ignorant of the world’s conventions, he at times possesses astounding insight into how society operates. The temptation of the comedian is to conveniently modify his characters for a few extra laughs. While it is certainly unfair to judge the protagonist of a picaresque novel by the standards of realism, Huck’s inconsistency undercuts some of the comedic power of the book.

In the opening chapters Huck’s ignorance humorously undermines accepted social conventions. When a religious widow, after attempting to convince Huck of the benefits of Christianity, asserts that Tom Sawyer won’t be going to Heaven, Huck quips that he is glad he won’t go to Heaven “because I wanted [Tom Sawyer] and me to be together.” Twain extends Huck’s naiveté even further when Huck fails to understand that Tom’s fantasy games are not real. In one scene Huck believes that a traveling troupe of invisible Arabs with two hundred elephants was conjured by a genie. It is only after the incident that Huck reconsiders his gullibility. He “thought all this over for two or three days” and rubs an old lamp hoping to find a genie before eventually concluding “all that stuff was only just one of Tom sawyer’s lies... It had all the marks of Sunday School.”

Although it takes Huck three days to establish that Tom’s fantasies aren’t true, later in the novel Huck can immediately figure out how to convincingly lie to other characters. In one instance, Huck fabricates an entire story to convince a ferryman to lead a rescue party to save several people trapped in a sinking riverboat. Yet later, Huck is not able to figure out that the criminals called The Duke and The King are not real royalty. Huck’s capacity to understand and speak the truth seems to change in every scene.

The naïve narrator is a recurring trope in comic novels, which allows the author to objectively examine the hypocrisies and inconsistencies of society through the eyes of a figure who is not burdened by social preconceptions. But Twain conveniently adapts a narrator with a flexible naiveté, who can alternatively be ignorant of society’s sins and also knowingly participate in them. The consistently shifting innocence of Huck’s personality heightens the comedy throughout the novel, but also sacrifices the some of its substance.

Twain’s problematic use of comedic flexibility culminates in the novel’s controversial final scene. At the end of the novel, Jim is recaptured after a failed escape attempt and appears to be on the brink of being sold back into slavery. Miraculously, Jim is saved when Tom reveals that the whole escape plan was an elaborate game—Jim was already freed by his mistress on her deathbed. Some critics have criticized this ending as an evasion that allows Twain to avoid dealing with the evils of slavery, while others have defended the scene as a burlesque satire that serves as an appropriate conclusion for a picaresque novel. But disregarding this critical debate, the ending serves as the ultimate example of Twain’s tendency to sacrifice substance for satire. The deeper issues of the novel are thrown aside to make way for a happy and entertaining ending.

—Columnist Theodore J. Gioia can be reached at tgioia@fas.harvard.edu.