Mark Twain's New Method of Cultural Critique: Authorial Double-Voiced Speech in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

When Mark Twain shifted from the third-person, omniscient point-of-view of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) to its sequel, a first-person narrative told by a prepubescent, semi-literate, town pariah who holds the same racist beliefs as do other whites in the antebellum Mississippi Valley, he had to develop new strategies of authorial presence. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), barred from personal commentary, Twain employed seven methods for critiquing racism, slavery, the antebellum South, and Reconstruction. First, he allowed characters to reveal their prejudices through direct speech. The clearest example is Pap's tirade about an African American professor whom he describes as multilingual, erudite, and dignified—and then calls "a prowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted free nigger," oblivious to his own illogic.¹ A second method, having a character express Twain's views in something close to the author's own voice occurs once. When Colonel Sherburn faces down the lynch mob, Twain reworks his own blistering words from Life on the Mississippi (1883) into Sherburn's speech to condemn southerners as cowards.² A third method was symbolism, although atypical for Twain, as when he names the wrecked steamboat the Walter Scott, whose popularity in the South he blamed for the region's "sham chivalries" and "reverence for rank and caste."³

But the main methods of Twain's critique are, fourth, the ironic discrepancy between Huck's perspective and what should be the reader's perspective, and fifth, Jim's actual words and actions. Huck may be the most prolific and effective liar in American literature, usually out of necessity, but toward the reader he is sincere, even confessional, in describing his own thoughts and feelings. He also reports actions accurately, but there is a huge difference between how he assesses them and how Twain expects the reader to evaluate them, and this ironic disjunction—due to Huck's naïveté and racism—goes way beyond the inherent unreliability of first-person narrators. A simple example is when Jim says he would get an abolitionist to liberate his children, and Huck, recalling a racist maxim—"give a nigger an inch and he'll take an ell"—is horrified that Jim "would steal his children—children that belonged to a man I didn't even know; a man that hadn't ever done me no harm" (124). But Huck is also an empiricist committed to the evidence of his own senses over the hegemonic influence of his culture, and thus capable of growth. Later on, hearing Jim moan over the loss of his children, he reports: "I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks does for theirn. It don't seem natural, but I reckon it's so" (201). A pragmatist, Huck believes in what William James would later term the "cash-value" of an idea, that its truth be judged not as a "static" quality, but rather by the "concrete difference … its being true [will] make in any one's actual life[.]" As James underscores it and Huck lives it, "True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we can not."⁴

The difference between what Huck makes of his observations and what the reader makes of them works in tandem with Twain's fifth method of authorial presence—his portrayal of Jim. By wearing his minstrel mask and reflecting back the racial stereotypes that whites believe in, while manipulating Huck and others from behind that mask, Jim's intelligence, motivations, and real thoughts and feelings can be difficult to discern. But if the reader looks closely and asks, at critical junctures, what are Jim's best options, the real Jim, a highly intelligent, three-dimensional man wearing the minstrel mask rather than a simpleton straight out of a minstrel show, comes sharply into focus. Just a few examples include: Jim cleverly extracting Huck's promise not to tell before revealing that he's a fugitive (52); preventing Huck from seeing the dead Pap...