Huckleberry Finn: Romantic Hero in a Realistic Age

After the Civil War, American literature shifted away from the Romanticism of the previous years towards a more realistic framework, with less idealistic characters. One of the major figures of the Realist movement, however, still imbued the characteristics of the Romantic hero into his novels, and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn thus remains one of the definitive works of the American literary spirit. The novel’s protagonist is Huck Finn, a young man who embodies the idealistic traits of the previous age, though he lives in a corrupted world that increasingly stifles him as he becomes more aware of it. The narrative follows Huck and Jim, a runaway slave, as they travel down the Mississippi River in an attempt to escape from a society that abuses both of them. Huck narrates the tale, and the reader may therefore see and identify with the boy’s point of view, and admire him for the courageous actions he takes, as he unconsciously exemplifies the Romantic ideals of nobility and individualism. Huck displays his noble sentiments, for instance, in his desire to always do what is right according to his conscience, and, therefore, when he feels it necessary to do wrong, he must take on a persona, because he has great trouble telling lies as himself. He shows his individualistic nature, as well, in his treatment of Jim as a real person as opposed to a mere piece of property, and by his complete disgust for civilization and the dishonesty it engenders among people.

Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn exhibits a Romantic sense of nobility in his desire to always do as his conscience tells him is right. Early in the book, for instance, as he and Jim are rafting down the Mississippi river, they come across a wrecked steamboat, upon which Huck discovers a gang of murderous thieves. Huck steals their escape boat to leave them stranded, but later feels bad about it and stops to send them help (308-09). Later on in their journey, the young hero is helping two con men known as “the king” and “the duke” falsify themselves as heirs to an estate, but when one of the daughters of the deceased comes to Huck’s defense, he says to himself, “this is a girl that I’m letting that old reptile rob her of her money!” (375), and decides that he will steal the money back for her and her sisters, since he “felt so low down and ornery and mean” (375). His noble sentiments then become more concrete when he resolves to tell the girl about his conniving partners, and he sees for the first time that there is a real moral difference between lying and telling the truth, as he states, “here’s a case where I’m blest if it don’t look to me like the truth is better, and actually safer, than a lie” (382). Huck Finn’s most noble act, though, comes when he decides to rescue Jim from captivity instead of returning the man to his original owners. For, though all of Huck’s social acquaintances and all of his upbringing would tell him that turning in a runaway slave is the right thing to do, he knows in his heart that it is not, and he finally decides to follow his conscience, as he passionately states, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” (399), and sets out to free his friend.

Huck demonstrates his nobility not only in his desire to do right, but also in the fact that, in cases where he must do something wrong, such as lie, he cannot usually do it as himself, but must instead adopt a persona, which he can only keep up for a limited time with marginal success. He first dons such a disguise shortly after he has run away, when he dons girl’s clothes to return to town and learn news of what the townspeople know of himself and Jim. He imitates a girl poorly, though, and the woman whom he visits soon discovers he is a counterfeit, though he does not reveal his true identity (299-303). When he must stand by the king and the duke later in the novel, playing their servant and defending their story, he does so poorly, since he does not believe in it himself and he knows that what he is doing is wrong, and the man questioning him says, “I reckon you ain’t used to lying, it don’t seem to come too handy; what you want is practice. You do it pretty awkward” (389). Then, when he goes to visit the family who holds Jim captive, to devise a way for the slave’s escape, he discovers that the captors are relatives of his boyhood friend Tom Sawyer, and they mistake him for Tom. He then carries on as Tom, thinking that he should be able to do it easily, but he finds that he cannot, even after Tom himself arrives (405-446). Huck can tell lies while pretending to be his friend, but he cannot actually be Tom Sawyer for long, since Huck sees the world around him as it really is, while Tom sees a more fanciful fiction before him, and thus has little trouble lying.

While Huckleberry Finn is certainly noble, he also displays a truly Romantic individualism through the way he treats Jim, as a real person with real feelings rather than as a piece of property. Huck first starts to come to this realization of Jim’s humanity after he plays a joke on the runaway slave to make him think that he’s been seeing things. When Jim discovers that Huck was fooling him, he says, without laughing, “all you wuz thinkin’ ‘bout was how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie” (318), which makes the boy feel so bad about himself that he goes and apologizes to Jim, a difficult action for a white man of the time to take. As Huck recounts, “It was almost fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger – but I done it, and I warn’t ever sorry for it afterwards, neither” (318). A short while later, he becomes conscious of the fact that he is helping a runaway slave, and decides to do the ‘right’ thing and turn the man in. But when Jim tells him, “you’s de bes’ fren’ Jim’s ever had” (320), Huck cannot bring himself to carry out his plan. Huck recognizes Jim as a person more and more as the story goes on and Jim becomes a sort of surrogate father to Huck. The man takes the boy’s watch at the tiller of the raft and helps him in every way he can, and, at one point, tells Huck a poignant story of his own children, which, through its recounting in the novel, shows Huck’s respect for Jim’s humanity (363). Huck also recalls that, “he was the easiest nigger to laugh that ever was” (345), and when Huck later thinks about how good a friend Jim is to him, he makes his final, irreversible decision to help his friend find freedom (399). Jim is, as Huck states, “white inside” (437), which is the best compliment the boy can give him.

Huck exhibits his individualist attitude not only in the way he treats Jim as an individual, but also in his contempt for a corrupt society that seems to trod upon individuals. Huck grumbles from the beginning of the novel over the tediousness of the trappings of civil society, noting off-hand the inherent hypocrisy in his guardian’s criticism of his pipe smoking, when the old woman herself uses snuff (265). His opinion of humanity as a group then continues to drop as the story progresses. Huck sees purity and goodness, on the other hand, in the solitude of nature, and he sees how nature devours the corruption of civilization, as the great river devours the towns upon its banks (353). He recalls the ugliness and cruelty of people, as he sees some men torturing dogs for fun, and one man gunning down another in the street for spite. The gunman later makes a powerful speech that seems to strike a chord with the young hero, stating that “The pitifulest thing out is a mob . . . But a mob without any man at the head of it, is beneath pitifulness” (357). Huck leaves this place quickly, as he despises the mob as much as anyone, and he prefers to live life “free and easy and comfortable on a raft” (338) to being stuck in the midst of the confining hypocrisy of civilization, which is a thing that simply serves to demonstrate that men can only live honestly when living alone. As he observes the king and the duke first perform their ruse on the young girls of the estate, for instance, he says, “It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race” (367). Upon seeing how these men can cheat such innocent young girls, and how the people of a town can be so weak-willed when they see a man murdered on the street in broad daylight, Huck is disgusted with society. When he later watches the king and the duke receiving their due punishment at the hands of a mob, though, he feels sorry for them, and laments that, “It was a dreadful thing to see. Human beings can be awful cruel to one another” (409). At the end of the tale, after Jim has gained his freedom and Tom has returned home, the hero states emphatically, “I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”

The young protagonist of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a true Romantic hero living in an unclean social world, who still portrays the nobility and individualism of times past. Huck’s desire to always do the right thing, as his conscience dictates, demonstrates his nobility, as does his inability to break his implicit moral code while acting as himself. He portrays his individualistic spirit through his respect for Jim as a fellow human being and a distinct individual, as well as through his contempt for the hypocrisy of society and its subjugation of man’s honest nature.