Narrative Laws and Narrative Lies in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

NARRATIVE LAWS AND NARRATIVE LIES IN ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN George Monteiro Brown University Here were leagues of shore changing shape. My spirits were down in the mud again. Two things seemed pretty apparent to me. One was, that in order to be a pilot a man had got to learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to know; and the other was, that he must learn it all over again in a different way every twenty-four hours. Life on the Mississippi (1883) For a time it looked as if the book would not be brought to conclusion. The main fault lay, of course, with Samuel Langhorne Clemens , who was, as always, the authority responsible for Mark Twain, the writer who, in turn, cooked up Huck Finn, also an author who, in his own turn, is credited with the creation of the persona responsible for narrating the autobiographical work he called, in cahoots with all the other authorities, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. At least three times they—Sam, Mark, and Huck—set aside (or abandoned) the manuscript that, when published, would carry, parenthetically, an informative subtitle: "Tom Sawyer's Comrade." Begun in 1876, shortly after the publication of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the first draft of the completed manuscript of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was not finished until 1883. Indeed, for whatever the author's personal reasons, work on Huck's adventures came only in sustained spurts: the first one in 1876, the second in 1879-80, the third sometime between 1880 and the summer of 1883, and the last during the summer of 1883. There has been much speculative interpretation concerning, along with substantive sifting (and shifting) of, the available evidence to account for these considerable breaks in the writing of Huck's account. Whether the author's periodic writing blocks were aesthetic or thematic or whether they derived from deeply personal problems exacerbated by the author's involvement with the substance of his semi-memorial narrative has not been determined. But it is known that at clearly identifiable times in the seven or more years it took him to complete his book, the author was able to pick up whatever manuscript had so far accumulated and push his narrative appreciably forward until that day in 1883 when, on page 787 of his holograph manuscript, he could write: "The End, yours truly Huck Finn."—twice underlining each word to emphasize the fact of completion and to express, one surmises, a medly of feelings: satisfaction, relief, fatigue, pleasure, perhaps even elation.1 228George Monteiro The author had finally won his long battle with this narrative, one that was wont to snag and stay snagged for months and sometimes years at a time. Yet at the end, particularly with the final twenty-two chapters (of the forty-three chapters that make up the book), composition came with a rush. To his friend and fellow writer, William Dean Howells, he wrote from his farm in Elmira: "I haven't piled up MS so in years as I have done since we came here to the farm three weeks & a half ago. Why, it's like old times, to step straight into the study, damp from the breakfast table, & sail right in & sail right on, the whole day long, without thought of running short of stuff or words. I wrote 4000 words to-day & I touch 3000 & upwards pretty often, & don't fall below 2600 on any working day."2 And things went on in this headlong way, it seems, to the end of the writing. "I am piling up manuscript in a really astonishing way," he boasted; "I believe I shall complete, in two months, a book which I have been fooling over for 7 years. This summer it is no more trouble to me to write than it is to lie."3 It is true that Clemens does not here equate writing with lying, but for some reason the association tumbled from his brain. It is also true that Mark Twain's interpreters have not made much (if anything) of this at first seemingly casual association, though they have made a great deal, and deservedly so, of Huck's epiphanic formulation, within...