No Evading the Jokes: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, and Male Friendship Across Racial and Class Lines

Using biographical, historical, and textual analysis, this essay explores the complex dynamics that emerge among Huck, Jim, and Tom, especially during the pranks of the “evasion.” While biographical events do not translate into literary inspiration, Twain’s inter-class and interracial relationships, particularly with George Griffin and John T. Lewis, can illuminate the role of pranks, their complex effect on power dynamics in friendship, and the underlying coherence of the novel. As part of Clemens’s domestic sphere, these men helped Clemens to envision a sense of male friendship separate from but partly constrained by societal strictures. While many readers have caviled at Tom Sawyer’s return in the novel’s final section, that return tests everything Huck has learned or thought he has learned about himself, friendship, society, integrity, and community. Tom’s secure sense of self within society’s hierarchy exposes Huck’s and Jim’s tenuous positions and disrupts their fragile, insular, and domestically based friendship.