“The Problem of the Ending”

            --by Leo Marx

To bring HF to a close, MT had to do more than find a neat device for ending a story.  His problem, though h it may never have occurred to him, was to invent an action capable of placing in focus the meaning of the journey down the Mississippi.

I believe the ending of HF makes so many readers uneasy because they rightly sense that it jeopardizes the significance of the entire novel.

“Git up and hump yourself, Jim.  There ain’t a minute to lose.  They’re after us!”  No one is after Huck.  In that small word MT compresses the exhilarating power of Huck’s instinctive humanity.  His unpremeditated identification with Jim’s flight from slavery is an unforgettable moment in American experience.

The most obvious thing wrong with the end, then, is the flimsy contrivance by which MT frees Jim.

Miss Watson is the enemy.  MT makes little attempt to account for Miss Watson’s change of heart, a change particularly surprising in view of Jim’s brazen escape.

The ending, one might contend, is simply a burlesque upon Tom’s taste for literary romance.  It is out of keeping;  the slapstick tone jars with the underlying seriousness of the voyage.

The major characters are forced to play low comedy roles.  Moreover, the most serious motive in the novel, Jim’s yearning for freedom, is made the object of nonsense.  The conclusion, then, is a farce, but the rest of the novel is not.

“Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.”  But at this point Tom reappears.  Soon Huck has fallen almost completely under his sway once more, and we are asked to believe that the boy who felt pity for the rogues is now capable of making Jim’s capture the occasion for a game.  He becomes Tom’s helpless accomplice, submissive and gullible.  To satisfy Tom’s hunger for adventure he makes himself party to sport which aggravates Jim’s misery.

It should be added at once that Jim doesn’t mind too much.  The fact is that he has undergone a similar transformation.  On the raft he was an individual, man enough to denounce Huck when Huck made him the victim of a practical joke.  In the closing episode, however, we lose sight of Jim in a maze of farcical invention.   He das been made over in the image of a flat stereotype:  the submissive stage-Negro.

What I have been saying is that the flimsy devices of the plot, the discordant farcical tone, and the disintegration of the major characters all betray the failure of the ending.  I would maintain that this book has little or no formal unity independent of the joint purpose of Huck and Jim.

The unhappy truth about the ending of HF is that the author, having revealed the tawdry nature of the culture of the great valley, yielded to its essential complacency.

Clemens understood people like the Phelpses, but nevertheless he was forced to rely on them to provide his happy ending.  The satisfactory outcome of Jim’s quest for freedom must be attributed to the benevolence of the very people whose inhumanity first made it necessary.

“The Uncomfortable Ending of Huckleberry Finn”

                                    --by  James M. Cox

In the last ten chapters Twain turns the book over to the high jinks of Tom Sawyer, while Huck shrinkingly assumes the stature of a little straight man.

The cause of this slump on MT’s part is simply that the journey, the Quest, cannot succeed.  The drifting river has taken Huck and Jim ever deeper into slavery, and MT, unable to resolve the paradox of this reality which defeats his wish, simply evades the entire issue by shifting to burlesque.

Tom’s adventures are a unique cruelty in a book  which depicts so much cruelty.  All the other cruelties are committed for some reason—for honor, money, or power.  But Tom’s cruelty has a purity all its own—it is done solely for the sake of adventure

Having felt Huck’s slow discovery of Jim’s humanity, the reader perforce deplores Tom’s casual ignorance and unawareness.

If the reader sees in Tom’s performance a rather shabby and safe bit of play, he is seeing no more than the exposure of the approval with which he watched Huck operate.  For if Tom is rather contemptibly setting a free slave free, what after all is the reader doing, who begins the book after the fact of the Civil War?  This is the “joke” of the book—the moment when, in outrageous burlesque, it attacks the sentiment which its style has at once evoked and exploited.  To see that Tom is doing at the ending what we have been doing throughout the book is essential to understanding what the book has meant to us.

To be frustrated by the ending is to begin to discover the meaning of the journey