the ethics of self-interest: narrative logic in huckleberry finn

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The Ethics of Self-Interest: Narrative Logic in Huckleberry Finn Author(s): James L. Kastely Source: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Mar., 1986), pp. 412-437 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3044730 . Accessed: 10/06/2014 20:50 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Nineteenth-Century Fiction. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 194.29.185.131 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 20:50:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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The Ethics of Self-Interest: Narrative Logic in Huckleberry FinnAuthor(s): James L. KastelySource: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Mar., 1986), pp. 412-437Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3044730 .

Accessed: 10/06/2014 20:50

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toNineteenth-Century Fiction.

http://www.jstor.org

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The Ethics of Self-Interest: Narrative Logic in Huckleberry Finn JAMES L. KASTELY

7lwo CRUCIAL CHOICES by Huck frame the episodes from the end of chapter 15

to the middle of chapter 31 of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In each of these choices, Huck experiences a conflict between his feel- ings (which move him to act on Jim's behalf) and his conscience (which demands that he behave according to the values of his so- ciety). Huck resolves each conflict in the same way: without re- pudiating the authority of his conscience, he will disobey it and come to Jim's rescue. The episodes occurring between the choices do not enable Huck to free himself from or gain any perspective on his corrupt conscience. Instead of allowing Huck a chance to work through his internal conflicts, the middle of the novel focuses attention on the river communities, as Huck's role shifts from pri- marily being a narrator-actor to being a narrator-observer.' Huck seems to advance little and to learn nothing from his first major conflict, and the episodes that occur between Huck's first and sec- onid choices do not seem to connect these choices in any meaning- ful way.

Huck and Jim's move from the center of the story is not vol- untary; rather, their position is usurped by the Duke and King.

(C 1986 by The Regents of the University of California

'Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), p. 117.

412

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These two frauds force their way into and occupy a third of the novel. Certainly, part of the reason for their prominence is that they afford Twain continued opportunities to satirize the falsely sentimental values of the river communities.2 But such satire is not really necessary at this point in the novel. We have a clear per- spective on both the brutality and the sentimentality of civilization when Huck first goes against his conscience. If the primary reason for these episodes were satire, then they should have been placed before chapter 16 in which Huck and Jim near Cairo. It makes no sense to indict the society after Huck has already been confronted by its values as they are represented internally by his conscience. Further, the satire plays no direct role in the choice that Huck must make following these events. If satire were the primary purpose of these episodes, then they must be viewed as a flaw, for they do not develop Huck's moral dilemma and are in fact a digression from it.

To understand how the middle chapters contribute to the cen- tral issue of the novel, we must see the satire in the larger context of the two serious developments that take place in these chapters. First, there is the escalation of violence, as the vision of the novel darkens until it approaches a final misanthropy in Colonel Sher- burn's speech. But while this development is straightforward, the second movement, the direction of our sympathy for the Duke and King, is not. We are initially drawn to and applaud the con artistry of the two reprobates. But as the middle section develops, our sympathy shifts away from them until we are willing to extend Huck's characterization of the King as an old reptile to cover the pair. The darkening vision and the reversal of our sympathy are integrally related, for both raise questions about the possibility and desirability of community. Taken together, these two developments disclose the function of the novel's middle: to explore seriously an ethics of self-interest. Huck's first choice-to reject his conscience- makes such an inquiry necessary, and we see the consequences of this inquiry for Huck in the different justification that he offers for stealing Jim out of the slavery into which he had been sold by the Duke and King.

2Smith, Mark Twain, p. 116. See also Walter Blair, Mark Twain and Huck Finn (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1960), p. 271.

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If Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel about escape and freedom, it is so because it is a novel about community.3 True freedom in the novel does not exist in nature-and certainly not for an individual isolated in nature. Rather than freedom being the property of a place to which one escapes, it is instead a quality or equality of relationship. Freedom is problematic in Huckleberry Finn, not because the novel's ending is ambiguous, but because it is certain. One thing is beyond doubt at the end: Huck and Jim can never come together in the way they were on the river. The pathos of the novel resides not in the impossibility of freedom but in the fact that community was achieved and lost. If the novel is ambiguous in its affirmation, it is because we realize how powerful the moments of community are, and at the same time how rare and evanescent.

The novel begins as an ethical inquiry when Huck and Jim meet on Jackson's Island and constitute themselves as a community. Their act of joining together to aid Jim's escape to freedom places them irrevocably outside conventional society. The new conventions of Huck and Jim-Lionel Trilling's community of saints-are yet to be formed, and the purpose of their adventures, first as they live on Jackson's Island and then as they float down the Mississippi toward Cairo, is to determine the basis of this community.

These episodes educate Huck about the ethical basis of friend- ship; for until Huck runs with Jim, he is without a friend. Although

3I will use the term "community" to-refer to -the social unit that Huck and Jim constitute. This unit is an ethical creation in which human beings are bound together by freely assumed obligations toward each other. My concern is dif- ferent from that of Thomas Blues in Mark Twain and the Community (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1970) in which he sees community as the existing society, exemplified for Twain in the small town (p. xi). Both Blues and I explore the relationship of the individual to community, and we are both concerned with the dangers of what I will call an "individualistic" ethics; but we focus our inquiries on quite different issues. Blues investigates Twain's attitude toward an idealized relationship of individual and community "in which an indepen- dent individual could freely challenge the community's values, disrupt its sense of order, and yet somehow retain his identity as a conventional member of it" (p. ix). I am inquiring into the ethical problems and possibilities created by acknowledging the humanity of another. My inquiry focuses on the conse- quences for Huck when he enters into community with Jim.

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Tom Sawyer is certainly Huck's companion, he is not finally Huck's friend. At least, he is not if equality is a condition of friendship, for Tom and Huck are not equals. Tom is the leader who organizes games in which he can be a hero; for the most part, Huck is just a follower who goes along. Tom's romantic ideals are equally im- portant in preventing a full friendship between him and Huck. Tom can never equal Huck's escape from final determination by the culture's sentimentality because Tom's ideals are merely a trans- lation of that sentimentality, and they thus contain him within the values of his culture.4 Although Huck can play with Tom, he cannot be his free self with him.5 The novel emphasizes the impossibility of Huck's freedom in a community with Tom when it opens with Tom's returning Huck to civilization through the bribe of one of Tom's romantic fantasies.

In contrast, Jim offers Huck a relation of equality in which there is an opportunity for true meeting. This is something new for Huck, and its novelty is demonstrated by Huck's inappropriate behavior. Part of the reason Huck plays tricks on Jim is that Huck does not know how to treat a friend, so he continues to act toward Jim in the way that Tom and he had acted earlier in the novel. Huck is never intentionally cruel to Jim; rather, Jim is not yet a person for Huck. For Huck to reach an understanding of the con- ventions of friendship, he needs to witness how his thoughtlessness injures Jim.6

Huck's ignorance about friendship is not surprising, for this novel is aware of how rare true friendship is. The novel is obsessed with isolation and disguise because these are to be expected in a

4Blues, Mark Twain and the Community, p. 5. George C. Carrington, Jr., sees Tom's high degree of security as the quality that allows him to be the major dramatist of the novel (The Dramatic Unity of "Huckleberry Finn" [Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1976], pp. 98-99).

5Carrington's The Dramatic Unity will take the implications of this point in a different direction (see pp. 173-76), and although I sometimes disagree with him, I find his argument about the dramatic structure powerful.

6Huck's education on the raft begins almost immediately when he and Jim encounter the Walter Scott. What should be an adventure has unintended and disproportionate consequences. The world now counts for Huck in ways that it could not while he remained within society. The events of the novel dem- onstrate the physical and psychological precariousness of placing oneself out- side conventional society. The community is the only place of reassurance, and its existence is at best tenuous.

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world where there is little friendship and where every meeting opens the possibility for new violence. What one learns in such a world is how to protect one's humanity by hiding it, but this hiding then condemns the self to solitude. The first chapter ends with lonesome sounds. Even before the beatings drive Huck to seek an escape from Pap, his lonesomeness causes him to act: "Once [Pap] locked me in and was gone three days. It was dreadful lonesome. I judged he had got drowned and I wasn't ever going to get out any more. I was scared. I made up my mind I would fix up some way to leave there."7 Huck does not have a destination; rather, he is running from a world in which there is no friendship but only the inadequate and crushing human relationships that are exem- plified in the brutality of Pap and the sentimentality of the widow.

Only on Jackson's Island does Huck begin to see the conse- quences of living without others. Once alone, Huck begins to con- front the limits of such a life:

When it was dark I set by my camp fire smoking, and feeling pretty satisfied; but by-and-by it got sort of lonesome, and so I went and set on the bank and listened to the currents washing along, and counted the stars and drift-logs and rafts that come down, and then went to bed; there ain't no better way to put in time when you are lonesome; you can't stay so, you soon get over it. (p. 64)

Still, such a resolution can only be temporary, for Huck is not that self-sufficient. Although he certainly has the skills to survive in nature, Huck needs people. The nightmarish quality of his later separation from Jim in the fog shows how terrifying a world of genuine isolation is.

But when Huck meets Jim on Jackson's Island, Jim is not the friend that he will become later on. Despite Jim's being only an acquaintance, Huck eagerly throws in his lot with him. There is little, indeed, in Jim's past to suggest the stature he will achieve. Up to this point in the novel, Jim is a limited, comic character- almost a burlesque figure in his superstition and incredulity. When

7Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, introd. Hamlin Hill, Chandler Facsimile Editions in American Literature (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 47. This edition is a facsimile of the first edition; subsequent page references appear parenthetically in the text.

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Huck agrees not to turn Jim in, he is not acting out of any prior commitment to Jim. The friendship follows upon rather than prompts Huck's decision to run with him. Huck simply needs to be with somebody, for he is not against community, just civilization.

In their budding friendship Huck and Jim enact in a modified form the mythic drama of Rousseau's theory of the social contract and leave their condition of being separate and unrelated individ- uals in the state of nature. Jim's telling his secret and Huck's keeping it are mutual acts of trust that form the community by binding the two members together in a common identity.8 The telling and promising produce a set of duties, as Huck and Jim enter into a community that marks them off from other people and unites them in an effort of self-protection.

But even this ethical community is partially compromised be- cause self-interest prevents a full openness. Jim withholds his rea- son for being on Jackson's Island until he has gotten Huck to promise not to tell on him. The original acts of trust are thus compromised at their very inception. The difficulty of a true com- munity is present at the founding of this new community. As hard as it is to flee physically from a society, it is even more difficult to escape from it historically and culturally. As Faulkner was to claim later, the institution of slavery cursed this culture. Jim disguises the truth and places his own interest before that of the new community, not because he is a dishonest person, but because his situation- being a slave-denies him the possibility of entering the community openly and equally. Because Jim is black and Huck is white, Jim cannot fully trust Huck. The impossibility of a truly open meeting between them is the curse (later embodied in Huck's handling of the snakeskin, a demonstration of Huck's willingness to challenge forces that Jim knows are implacable) that slavery brings to this new community, and it is what fates the community to instability. The community's precariousness is aptly captured in the novel's symbolic placing of the community on a raft in the water. The problem is not so much to escape as it is to stay afloat.

Given Jim's clear understanding of the danger of his position, it is even more remarkable that he would trust Huck to keep his

'Carriigton, The Dramatic Unity, p. 40, argues that this is a far more im- portant "moment of commitment" for Huck than the choice he will later make to go to Hell rather than turn Jim in.

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word after Jim explains that he has run away. Once Jim had re- vealed the truth, Huck could easily claim that Jim had tricked him, so that the promise would not count. But Huck does not avail himself of this ready excuse; instead, he reaffirms his promise and binds himself anew to Jim.

Still, Jim's confidence in Huck is not a simple act of faith, for Jim knows that Huck is also running away from St. Petersburg and will not return as long as Pap is around. Jim's deliberate withholding from Huck of his discovery that Pap is a dead man in the house floating on the river is a dishonesty within the community. Jim cannot be fully open with Huck, for the institution of slavery still stands between them. And Jim's not treating Huck openly imports the moral corruption of slavery into the new community.

Slavery's refusal to see people as people is the origin of a moral compromise that infects all members of the current civilization with self-interest. The cultural environment fates characters to struggle with a serious recognition of the humanity of another. The mark of an ethically superior character in the novel is not to be free of self-interest but to be able to experience conflicts between self- interest and the legitimate interests of another. These conflicts pro- vide the one assurance that human beings are not exclusively determined by their environment and the only hope for a new self and, consequently, a new and truer community. For a true com- munity to emerge, Huck and Jim must somehow defy the roles that slavery has assigned them and which Jim's lies have helped to perpetuate.

Huck's trick on Jim after their separation in the fog is the catalyst that moves the pair toward a community, unstable and compromised as it is, in which true friendship and, hence, true democracy are possible. The moment that allows this community to be democratic and not paternal is Jim's assertion of his humanity and consequently his right to dignity. The community does not become a true community until Huck violates one of its funda- mental tenets: people are an end in themselves. In his trick on Jim after their separation in the fog, Huck uses Jim's caring as a means and does not respect his love as an end. Huck's joke exploits Jim, for it reduces him to being simply material for Huck's amusement. When Jim rejects the role of buffoon, he asserts that he is a person (this is something that his escape did not assert), and consequently

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he becomes a presence in the novel. He has made what Camus was later to analyze as a fundamental act of rebellion.9 Slavery denied that Jim was a person, and he accepted this denial; but he will not allow Huck, whom he knows as a person, to assume the old roles toward him now that they have formed a new community. Huck's trick crosses the limit, and in this crossing it allows Jim to find his humanity and in this finding to make Huck acknowledge it. Jim looks at Huck "steady, without ever smiling," and says:

"En all you wuz thinkin 'bout wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren's en makes 'em ashamed."

Then [Jim] got up slow, and walked to the wigwam, and went in there, without saying anything but that. But that was enough. It made me feel so mean I could almost kissed his foot to get him to take it back.

It was 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. I didn't do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn't done that one if I'd a knowed it would make him feel that way. (p. 12 1)

With Huck's apology, a new possibility for friendship opens because Huck has acknowledged Jim's humanity and his inherent right to dignity. If old social categories are still in place because no one can ever simply dismiss his or her social and historical context, a new and genuine relationship exists between Huck and Jim. Despite the compromised origin of the new community, Huck and Jim have moved to a friendship that transcends their cultural situation.

Even as Huck is acknowledging Jim's humanity, however, the raft continues to float south and to carry them beyond Cairo. The story's events make it clear that although Huck's acknowledgment of Jim is an ethical advance for Huck, it will not solve Jim's prob- lems. First, freedom is a property of an open and equal community, and given that the larger social and historical context cannot finally be evaded, a stable and open community is not fully possible. Huck's later inability to transcend his incomplete understanding of his own corruption by society is convincing evidence of the impossibility of

'Albert Camus, Thle Rebel, foreword Sir Herbert Read, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), p. 13. Originally published as L'Homme revolte (Paris: Gallimard, 1951).

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a true integration of the raft community into the larger society. Second, the raft community, cursed by its origin in slavery, is itself corrupt. The community cannot be a fully ethical community until Jim recants and makes public his deception. Only Jim can free Jim, for no person can bring another into his or her full humanity; rather, each person must constitute himself or herself as an ethical being by a choice through which he or she will treat others as ends in themselves.

Indeed, Huck's apology to Jim is of interest not for its con- sequences forJim but because of its consequences for Huck. Huck's first serious contest with his conscience arises only because he has recognized Jim as a person and feels a divided loyalty. Huck has not yet discovered the positive implications of Jim's rebellion, and now his rebellion. As Camus points out, the beginning of any re- bellion is confused.'0 The rebel lacks a positive content to set in place of the rejected values. This lack of a specific alternative value system endangers Huck's moral growth, for the conflict out of which he might invent himself as an integral human being does not become available to him. Instead, when he interprets his strug- gle as a battle between social principle and individual transgression, Huck evades his deep internal conflict. Although he finally cannot allow Jim to return to a condition of being less than a person, Huck cannot work through his confusion to a motive that would enable him to free himself; by default he interprets his actions in terms of a motive that entraps him. At the crucial moment Huck does not see himself as a rebel but merely as an individual who is out of step with his society.

To justify his not turningJim in, Huck resorts to the reasoning of Pap:

Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on, s'pose you'd a done right and give Jim up; would you felt better than what you do now? No, says I, I'd feel bad I'd feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what's the use you learning to do right, when it's troublesome to do right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn't answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn't bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time. (p. 128)

'0Camus, The Rebel, pp. 14-15.

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This false reasoning on a true choice creates the grave moral danger that occupies the middle section of the novel. Part of Huck's ap- proach to the world has always been influenced by Pap. The logic of Huck's justification for his failure of will is the easy logic of accommodation that Pap uses to "borrow" chickens that are not roosting comfortably. This mode of reasoning is radically antisocial, for it recognizes no inherent limits to one's actions; rather, its ul- timate tenet is that the world is a place for individual exploitation."

Walter Blair has cautioned against hastily reading Huck's de- cision as merely a selfish choice. He argues, instead, that we should read Huck's choice in the context of Clemens' disagreement with Lecky:

Huck's decision that hereafter he will "do whichever comes hand- iest at the time" seems to be a decision to do what is expedient. But if he acts as he does on this occasion, the expedient thing, for him, will be the humane thing. Thus he will confound Lecky; for, though acting expediently, he will reach the same sort of decision a noble intuitive philosopher would reach, and for the same reason. 12

Although Blair is certainly right that Huck's actual motive is not selfish but generous, Blair's account fails to explore fully the prob- lem that Huck does not understand his decision in this way.'3 Twain's resolution of the conflict between intuition and calculation as a motive for moral action is not available to Huck, and Huck's equiv- ocation between his actual and his understood motive places him in serious moral danger.

The irony of Huck's partial escape from the corruption of his conscience is that it is purchased at the cost of his newly emerging moral understanding. If we rejoice that Huck finally cannot turn Jim in, we should immediately pause, for Huck has now decided to meet the world the way Pap does. Huck has escaped one moral quagmire only to fall into another. Because his corrupt conscience

"Blues, Mark Twain and the Community, p. 23. 12Blair, Mark Twain and Huck Finn, p. 143. 13Even to say that the decision is fully generous is to simplify Huck's moti-

vation. Part of what moves Huck to act is his guilt. Such heterogeneity of motives is one of the difficulties confronting any ethical actor. When an act is over- determined, how can an actor be sure that he is truly acting from an ethical motive?

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prevents him from acknowledging his true and praiseworthy mo- tive, he adopts the morally corrupt interpretation that understands the world solely in terms of self-interest and that defines it only as an arena in which people meet as combatants. Such a world is finally one in which community and, hence, meaningful freedom are not possible. 14

The logic of the narrative confirms this truth. Rather than Huck's decision leading to Jim's freedom, Huck's choice is followed immediately by the steamboat crashing into the raft and sundering the community of Huck and Jim. And in many ways this separation is final, for Huck and Jim will never achieve again (with one ex- ception that I will discuss later) the quality of the democratic com- munity they had on the raft as they floated from Jackson's Island to Cairo. The loss of the raft raises questions of progress and destination. Because of their journey, Huck and Jim are further from the freedom they seek. If they are not returned to exactly where they started, it is because their situation is worse. The ethical community's failure to lead to the freedom of its members has opened its members to a world that is more aggressively hostile to them because they have placed themselves outside of social con- ventions. Huck and Jim's original decision to defy the codes of slavery makes it impossible for them to reenter society, and instead they must confront a world in which they are more isolated.

The middle section retells the novel's beginning: two isolated characters form a community and become involved in a series of adventures that culminate in a choice that Huck must make between his heart and his conscience. But in this retelling of the story, the threats to Huck and Jim are greater than those offered by Pap and the widow, and the issue of freedom becomes murkier. Huck's de- cision has evoked the world of self-interest in unmitigated form, and the middle of the novel tells the tale of the journey that Huck has condemned himself to by the logic of his justification.

The narrative itself darkens as the world Huck enters acts out the state of war that is one logical conclusion of his moral position. The Shepherdson-Grangerford feud exemplifies the absurdity of

"4Carrington, The Dramatic Unity, p. 50, argues that Twain's position in the novel is that of his later work, What Is Man? in which all motives are finally self-interested ones. My argument is that the narrative shows that such a po- sition is not possible.

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a morality that permits and encourages people to meet others not as people but as enemies. The feud shows the inherent instability in such an ethics. The illogic of the feud (it has no recoverable origin and thus no purpose) is one of escalation, and, as in any war, the conflict is carried to its mortal conclusion. This episode holds out no possibility of reformation, of a peaceful end to the feud. If a human community is to exist, it must flee from the moral chaos of a civilization in which human meeting results in death. The function of the feud is to give support initially to an ethics of self-interest, for its shows a world that appears beyond redemption.

Huck had learned earlier that flight and not reintegration is the only available path to human community. But when Huck and Jim escape the feud and board the raft again, they soon find that there is no escaping civilization and its corruption. Huck's famous lyric appreciation of the river only returns to the corruption of civilization:

And you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t'other side of the river, being a wood-yard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres. (p. 158)

Not only is there no escaping the world, but Huck and Jim are now going deeper into slave country, and their world is becoming increasingly more dangerous.

The danger and corruption of the outside world is the back- ground against which we can understand why the novel's middle episodes must culminate in Huck's decision to free Jim. If we do not immediately see a moral danger in Huck's justification of his choice not to turn Jim in, it is because Twain has shown how ab- surdly immoral the larger world is. Little is to be hoped for from such a world, so a moral theory of individual expediency acquires plausibility. It is not simply that slavery has cursed civilization but that human beings are fundamentally corrupt. Who could one meet in such a world? Are not the only options disguise and lying? Does not simple self-preservation dictate an ethics of expediency?

As if to answer these questions, the Duke and King arrive. Henry Nash Smith explains how they serve as a fortunate device that allows Twain to deal with the divergence of Huck's deepening character from the earlier narrative plan:

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The introduction of the Duke and the King not only took care of the awkwardness in the plot but also allowed Mark Twain to post- pone the exploration of Huck's moral dilemma. If Huck is not a free agent he is not responsible for what happens and is spared the agonies of choice. Throughout the long middle section, while he is primarily an observer, he is free of inner conflict because he is endowed by implication with Mark Twain's own unambiguous attitude toward the fraud and folly he witnesses.15

Although Smith is certainly right that the invention of the two frauds gets Twain out of some difficulties, his analysis raises the question of whether the middle of the book bears anything more than a casual connection to the serious concerns of the novel's opening and of the closing of the middle section. But such an understanding means that the satiric sketches in the middle of the novel are a temporary abandonment of the story's central concern.

Smith is right again that Twain directs our attention away from Huck, for we focus on the Duke and the King and on the moral bankruptcy of shore life. Still, there is a decided movement in our understanding and sympathy in this section, and this movement culminates logically in a key decision by Huck. When the Duke and King first arrive on the raft, they appear as comic characters, and we minimize the danger they represent to Huck and Jim. Initially, we delight in the high jinks of the two scoundrels, for they fleece those who have asked for it. Our enjoyment of their swindles is, in part, a delight in moral revenge. The society that wraps itself in the garment of a sentimental morality is sold an appropriately false bill of goods. Indeed, the more we see of the communities along the river, the more justified the Duke and King seem. They are comic outlaws who achieve a kind of stature in their aggressive assault on society through exploiting false sentiments and false values.

The satires of the middle section serve primarily to support the reasonableness of an ethics of self-interest. The town of Bricks- ville becomes a confirmation of the recalcitrance of humanity against any possible improvement. The town provides no point of moral orientation. Its moral precariousness is allegorized in its physical precariousness, for nature through the agency of the Mississippi

'5Mark Twain, p. 119.

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River is reclaiming the town. The shiftlessness and casual cruelty of the loafers are indices that the town is beyond salvation. But if the loafers are incapable of improvement, they are for the most part unthreatening. They are too lazy even to disturb the peace. This is not the case with Boggs. Like Pap earlier in the novel, Boggs has the socially unfortunate habit of using his freedom of expres- sion to disturb the community's peace. Still if Boggs's disturbances are annoying, they cause no real harm. At worse, they affront the dignity of the town's leading citizens; at best, they provide a way for the loafers to pass the time without harassing innocent women and animals.

The episode, however, takes a terrifying turn when social re- spectability in the person of Colonel Sherburn confronts Boggs. Sherburn develops further the role of oppressive authority that Huck had glimpsed in Colonel Grangerford. In a world devoid of true community all forms of social control ultimately serve the interests of the powerful and rest on the use of violence. Boggs and Sherburn are importantly linked as two characters who, through their self-interested pursuit of private ends, display the corruption of either a freedom or a respectability rooted in self-interest.

Sherburn becomnes an especially troubling character because of his articulate contempt for the majority of the human race. The narrative appears to endorse his courage against and his insight into the mob, yet we must hold him accountable for his cold-blooded murder of the harmless Boggs. Shore life is reduced to two pos- sibilities: an animalistic anarchy or an inhuman and intractable oppression of any violation of social convention. The already ab- surd moral order of shore life becomes a full-blown nihilism. An ethics of self-interest seems the only viable position, and the Duke and the King, as its chief spokesmen, seem vindicated in their deceit and exploitation.

But our attitude shifts, and we come to regard them as true villains, not merely comic. This shift in sympathy allows us to dis- cover the moral danger in which Huck places himself when he resolves his moral dilemma by opting for an ethical justification that makes community impossible. Several things now become clear. First, there can be no simple opposition between shore and river, for the raft, which is Huck and Jim's sanctuary, is invaded, and there is no longer any place to escape to. Second, with the invasion

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of the raft, the basis of community is redefined. The Duke and King transform the raft, the place of true democracy, into a phony monarchy. Whereas the democracy was based on a fundamental trust, arose from a shared situation, was created by a promise, and was fulfilled in the recognition of the common humanity of its members, this sham aristocracy is conceived in deception and ef- fected through lies. And whereas the original community's purpose was to secure the freedom of its least advantaged members, the purpose of this new community is exploitation. Huck's lies have always been defensive, always and only in the interest of protecting himself and Jim. They were the only means through which the community without power could defend itself. And there was no lying within the community. Huck's trick on Jim goes to the heart of the community, for it raises the issue of treating another as less than a person. The Duke and King make no such distinction be- tween lies told within and outside the community, and their lies are not defensive maneuvers but aggressive attacks on other people. Our sympathy begins to shift when we realize how ruthlessly they adhere to the ethics of self-interest.

The Duke and King act out in unmitigated fashion the prin- ciples underlying Huck's justification for not turning Jim in. The problem of self-interest explains why the two outcasts who invade the middle of the novel are frauds rather than murderers or rob- bers or other dangerous transgressors. Fraud is the one crime that explicitly trades on and violates trust. It is a radically exploitative crime, for it sees others only as a means to an end. Fraud under- mines the possibility of community because it makes all meetings into false meetings by proclaiming that the only significant being in the world is the private self and that he is in no way bound to another. Like slavery, it denies the humanity of its victims because it only conceives of them as a means to an end and not as ends in themselves. Its only ethical consideration-if indeed, this kind of consideration can be called "ethical"-is the calculation of the pos- sible success of a particular action; the only limit is efficacy.

What Huck witnesses in the middle section of the novel is the enactment of an ethical doctrine. It is as if a god intervened and sentenced Huck to see in full force the inadequacy of Pap's prin- ciples of self-interest. When we examine what actually follows Huck's embrace of the principles of self-interest in the novel-the destruc-

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tion of a true community and its replacement by a false one that is founded on the very principles that Huck used in rejecting his conscience-we see that the drama of the middle section is the working out of the logic of exploitation. This portion of the novel allows us to understand the appeal of an ethics of exploitation when civilization is corrupt. Twain then undercuts the appeal when he shows the instability and repulsiveness of the ethics of individualism defined in terms of no essential social connection. Finally, we see this drama played out to its two necessary endpoints: betrayal and isolation.

Twain's decision to make Huck a narrator-observer rather than a narrator-actor must be understood as a consequence of his pur- pose to show the value of a false ethics of exploitation. When Huck assumes a more passive role, he acquiesces to the values of the Duke and the King. Henry Nash Smith's argument that Huck is not morally responsible because he does not act misses Huck's true accountability. For even if Huck does not initiate the action, he becomes morally culpable when he goes along with it-when he fails to see the exploitation as a moral issue. And Huck and Jim go along with the Duke and King because it "was all easy, so we done it" (p. 164). Huck even mentions later that he learned how to get along with these kinds of people from Pap.

The purpose of the ethical repulsiveness of the river com- munities is to prevent Huck from realizing that he has options other than those conceived of by Pap. Huck is an observer because the universe of the novel has argued against the possibility of a meaningful moral choice. Huck's danger is that his experience con- firms the ethics of his original justification and argues against there being any reason to pursue a moral action. Until he meets the Wilks sisters, Huck has been given no reason to act morally as long as he looks at the situation in terms of benefits to himself. He is thus still being defined by his environment; the environment, however, is no longer shaped by the false morality of St. Petersburg but by the nihilistic conditions of river life and the fraud's contempt for humanity.

Against this background of social barbarism and ruthless ex- ploitation, the Wilks episode assumes a new importance (an im- portance it should have, given its length). In this episode Huck resumes his role as actor when he makes the choice to go against

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the Duke and King. Central to his decision is his recognition of the Wilks sisters as human beings. Their acts of kindness to Huck when he is in the wrong break the grip of meanness and brutality that defines the middle section of the novel. Because Huck sees the Wilks sisters as human beings, he will go against the interests of his exploitative community: "They [the Wilks sisters] all jest laid theirselves out to make me feel at home and know I was amongst friends. I felt so ornery and low down and mean, that I says to myself, My mind's made up; I'll hive that money for them or bust" (p. 225). Huck's resolution runs counter to the value system he opted for when he chose not to turn Jim in. He is no longer doing what comes easiest; instead, he is courting difficulties and dangers by pursuing an action primarily because another will benefit from it. His ethical egotism has given way to an ethics founded on respect and concern for others. Although not liberated from a world of fraud, Huck at least escapes being determined by its values. He is no longer an inadvertent victim of his original justification.

Certainly Huck had tired of the Duke and King before meeting the Wilks sisters, and it is reasonable to assume that he and Jim would have gotten clear of the scoundrels at the first safe oppor- tunity. But if Huck and Jim had simply escaped from the Duke and King, Huck would have made no progress in freeing himself from the ethics of self-interest. Indeed, an escape that did not force Huck to act from a motive that ran contrary to self-interest would not free him but would only entrap him further by demonstrating that he was smarter than the two con artists. The Wilks episode is important not because Huck rejects the Duke and King but because his rejection is grounded on his recognition of the humanity of another.

The episode gives content to the idea of "true feeling." Such a feeling is of ethical interest not because it is based in sentiment but because it is the best answer we possess to the problem of ethical skepticism. What is important is not that the self feels good but that the self is aware of the presence of another human and that this awareness fates one to an ethical existence in which the primary concern is not a utilitarian calculation. The imperative for ethical existence arises because the individual self knows another self as a person, and once the self possesses this knowledge it cannot evade the consequences.

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As Kant recognized, all interesting human actions are over- determined. Huck's discovery and crediting of true feeling does not eliminate self-interest as a motive. Instead, it provides an al- ternative motive that is sufficiently powerful to enable him to go against his self-interest. Huck's resolution of the problem of self- interest is not intellectual. He does not move to an understanding that would allow him to reject Pap's principles; rather, he discovers motives within himself that can and do vie with self-interest. Huck's discovery of true feeling reestablishes the tension between self and communal (or human) interest. Both motives are basic. The novel's argument is not that self-interest can be eliminated, but that, by itself, it leads to an unstable and humanly impossible world. Self- interest is not a condition of freedom but a serious hindrance to our achievement of freedom.

To allow no mistake about the reason behind the correctness of Huck's choice, Twain does not let Huck's altruism accomplish its end. The narrative cannot argue for altruism in terms of conse- quences, for to do so is again to found ethics on the basis of cal- culation. Rather, that is the equivocation the novel wants to attack. In Huckleberry Finn calculation is always the mark of a system of false values, and the most contemptible characters, Pap, Miss Wat- son, the Duke and King, are calculators.

The alternative to an ethics based on calculation is one based on feeling, and this kind of understanding is difficult to achieve. As many commentators have noted, this novel is obsessed with false feeling. Indeed, the problem with a corrupt conscience is that the individual experiences the corruption as powerful feelings that are not immediately available to reflect upon. Nor is true feeling an issue of feeling good because following a corrupt conscience can lead to feeling good. And true feeling is to be distinguished from feeling guilty. The two slave traders perform an action that appears to be charitable when they give Huck money to compensate for their unwillingness to aid someone who they believe is a smallpox victim. Their actions are prompted by their feelings, but these feelings are not ethically liberating because they are finally rooted in selfishness. The slave traders are attempting to buy their way out of a moral obligation. Their motive contrasts with Huck's in- volvement with the Wilks sisters. His feelings cause him to assume obligations that directly endanger him. True, Huck's actions on

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behalf of the Wilks sisters will benefit him and Jim, but those po- tential benefits do not enter into his decision to aid the girls. Huck is moved to act simply because he cannot evade his knowledge that the Wilks sisters are human beings who are being injured.

Brutality and sentimentality are the poles of corrupt feeling. Each leads to the fundamental ethical failure of not meeting an- other human being as a human being; each makes true community impossible. Brutality is the logical conclusion of self-interest. There are no human beings in such a world, only brutes, for feeling has been reduced to appetite. Sentimentality, on the other hand, is a cheapened form of communal feeling that does not take the bru- tality and corruption of the world seriously. Sentimentality does not credit the recalcitrance of self-interest but rather rests content with a falsely complacent view of reality. At the base of sentimen- tality is a refusal to look at the world as it is. The widow, the judge who tries to reform Pap, and the revivalists whom the King fleeced share an unwillingness to recognize a fundamental corruption of self-interest in the human species. They do not recognize the terror of living in a corrupt world, so they will never experience the painful solitude that a character like Huck, who knows the world for what it is, must face. Sentimentality is a moral evasion of the human responsibility for brutality. This evasion is more a moral blindness than it is a deliberate hypocrisy. And this blindness achieves its highest expression in the response of the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons to the sermon on brotherly love-an ethical principle both families subscribe to as they try to murder the other family.

One of Jim's roles is to be a touchstone of true feeling. Jim's brief appearance in the middle section provides the one moment- a moment very much needed-of relief from the folly and violence of life both on shore and on the raft. As if to highlight the difficulty of true feeling, Twain makes Jim's moment one of regret at his not being fully human. But because Jim can feel regret, we know he can truly feel; and in his regret he shows the possibility of true human understanding. In his recognition of his momentary failure to understand his daughter, Jim testifies to his humanity as elo- quently as he did earlier when he was hurt by Huck's trick. The two instances share a failure of one human being to acknowledge another. And equally both moments become affirmative because

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the failure is understood and consequently the human being is seen. This is the truth that even the corrupt categories of conventional morality cannot finally suppress. In Jim's sorrow, Huck sees Jim's humanity: "[Jim] was thinking about his wife and his children, away up yonder, and he was low and homesick; because he hadn't ever been away from home before in his life; and I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks does for their'n. It don't seem natural, but I reckon it's so" (p. 201).

The selling of Jim is the act that shows fully the impossibility of a community of self-interest. The final act of the exploitative community is to deny the humanity of one character whose hu- manity the novel proclaims. The instability of self-interest as a motive for community is developed when the raft community's luck goes bad and it can no longer work its swindles on the outside world. It is natural in hard times for a community founded on self- interest to founder on self-interest. The logic of the ethics requires that the community enact its fraud upon itself when the members of the community turn on each other and a subgroup forms to exploit the weakest member of the community.

Twain had originally intended to have the Duke and King sell Jim into slavery as their revenge for Huck's telling on them.'6 Such an ending, however, would have diminished Twain's attack on an ethics of exploitation by giving the two frauds a motive other than self-interest. Such a motive would have made their actions less heinous and would not have taken self-interest to its logical con- clusion. But as the ending currently stands, the two frauds do not know that Huck has told on them, so their selling Jim cannot be an act of revenge. Rather, as far as they know, they are simply turning on those who have done them no injury but who have in fact aided them. Twain's revision makes self-interest the only motive for action. The logic of the narrative requires that the middle section of the novel, which has been a prolonged assault on hu- manity, must end with an act of final treachery as the dynamics of individualistic ethics force the Duke and King to sell Jim. Self- interest destroys the universe of self-interest. Jim and Huck are separated again, and Huck finds himself in his most profound isolation. The episodes between Huck's two crucial choices thus

'6Blair, Mark Twain and Huck Finn, p. 334.

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form a unit which, to borrow Sheldon Sack's term, is an "apo- logue"-a fiction designed to show a truth about the world.'7

To appreciate fully Huck's final rejection of his conscience, we need to know the pull of the individual solution. In a world as morally corrupt as that of Huckleberry Finn, the temptation is to become a Pap. The difficulty of true community is immense, and an earned cynicism seems so right. If this world cannot be changed, does not self-interest become the reasonable alternative? The pur- pose of the middle section of the novel is to show how unreasonable this reasonable alternative is.

When Huck finally decides against sending the letter to Miss Watson and instead decides to steal Jim out of slavery, the decision is fully altruistic. Huck's decision to go to Hell is a decision to give himself up so that Jim can be free. There is no self-interest in this decision; Jim's freedom is Huck's only end. The peripeteia occurs as Huck reflects on how close he came to damning himself. When Huck resolves to write to Miss Watson, he feels a genuine relief at the resolution of his psychic division-self-interest and a corrupt morality are now reconciled. All that is needed is a little ad hoc reasoning in which Huck reaffirms that Jim deserves the fate to which Huck is condemning him. The situation has freed Huck from Jim's presence, so the external goad to generous action (which Huck still needed in the Wilks episode) is gone. Huck is alone; whatever he chooses will be determined solely by Huck, and consequently he must assume full responsibility for it.

The process of choice is integral to the choice's being ethical. Huck does not reason out what he should do. Any utilitarianism in this episode precedes Huck's decision to inform on Jim, and he is never concerned with the ways in which he might benefit from freeing Jim. The decision to free Jim is rather a consequence of Huck's remembering Jim. What finally moves Huck to act is ac- knowledgment of his friendship with Jim and of the obligations that such friendship carries: "And at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim had in the world, and the only one he's got now" (p. 271).

"7Fzctzon and the Shape of Belief (Berkeley and LosAngeles: Univ. of California Press, 1964), pp. 8-10.

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Huck's imaginative re-creation of Jim through recalling their shared life has made Jim a person again, and Huck cannot consign a person back into slavery. Huck's growth can be seen in that he no longer requires Jim's physical presence to lead him to violate his corrupt conscience. When Huck first violated his conscience, his motives were mixed. Like the slave traders he had deceived, Huck acted partly out of guilt. If Jim had not been there physically, Huck may very well have kept to his plan of informing on him. But now Huck is acting as a Kantian legislator in the kingdom of ends. In the moment of this decision, Huck's courage is evident; he will will that there be a community when the possibility of such a community is remote. In Huck's initial promise not to tell on Jim, he forsook his fellow men and women. In his decision to steal Jim out of slavery, he forsakes God. And in this second decision Huck's only possible motive is one rooted in a genuine ethical community of fellow feeling in which one freely chooses responsibility for another.

This decision ends the novel as a quest for a community. Its final note is both heroic and tragic. We feel the force of the decision because we see its commitment to a human community. When Huck resolves to steal Jim out of slavery, there is little assurance that he will succeed. Huck begins beaten. Only against this context of utter defeat does the full force of his defiance become clear. Because he loves Jim, Huck is free. Again, Camus comes to mind, for his myth of Sisyphus tells the same story of freedom through defiance. Huck achieves his full humanity because he freely takes responsibility for another. Such freedom is finally rooted in the possibility of community.

The remainder of the novel confirms the tragedy of com- munity. The episodes that follow Huck's decision to free Jim are the farce that follows the tragedy, as the story becomes a travesty of a true escape and a genuine community.18 In its farce, the ending makes clear what has been lost and that this loss is attributable in part to the limits of the characters. When the community is recon- stituted by Tom, a false romance that diminishes its characters is

'8Again, Carrington and I agree about the ending as farce, but we draw different conclusions about the significance of the farce (see The Dramatic Unity, pp. 96-97).

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substituted for a world of true friendship and community. It is a story that depends on a lie: Tom does not tell Huck and Jim that he knows Miss Watson has freed Jim. He will keep Jim in slavery for the purpose of his own adventure. Tom has stumbled on a truth of the narrative: its continuation requires that Jim remain a slave, for the special quality of Huck and Jim's community has been a function of the community's response to a threat to Jim."9 And Twain cannot allow himself to do what he has Tom do. It is now time to free Jim, and Twain constitutes the ending's farcical com- munity to make clear what Huck and Jim have lost. The dropping off in the story's ending is its testament to the value of a real community. The author shows us what he and his characters will become if he attempts to keep his narrative going.

Indeed, what is striking about the ending is its conscious ar- tificiality, for we have the comic tale of an author who is not ade- quate to the heroic adventure that he is writing. His difficulties exist because he cannot see what is before his eyes, so he constructs a highly romantic narrative and misses the true heroism. Twain signals the literary aspect of the ending by having his stand-in author, Tom Sawyer, use Dumas as his authority. The fun in the final section is at the expense of Tom, the author. The comedy of the last section derives from the frantic logic of a narrative that is contemptuous of reality-nothing stands in the way of Tom's trans- forming imagination.20 But at the key moment, Tom's narrative fails because it comes into contact with reality. Tom is wounded; his heroic narrative falls to pieces, and Huck and Jim are forced momentarily to assume their earlier roles.2' If we learn later that Jim's freedom is the consequence of Miss Watson's repentance, we

'9Carrington explores the broader cultural implications of this problem (The Dramatic Unity, pp. 189-91).

200ne can almost detect an envy of Tom on the part of Twain. Tom is the unconscious writer who can without embarrassment compose his narrative. Twain had to begin his book with a disclaimer about its seriousness-followed immediately by an assurance of how carefully the book was written.

2"I read Tom's failure as an intended criticism of Tom as author. I agree with Carrington that Tom is the major fiction maker in the ending and that if we are to understand the ending, we must come to grips with Tom's role. But rather than seeing the end as a powerful demonstration of Tom's talents, I see his skill as failing him at a crucial moment. When Tom becomes delirious with fever, his drama has failed, and Huck and Jim must now save Tom. I take this ironic reversal to be intended as comment on Tom as author.

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can discount this as a spurious device of an author whose plot was failing him. We know that Jim earns his freedom when he gives it up for Tom's sake. In giving up his freedom, Jim frees himself from the taint of self-interest that had cursed his entry into the community with Huck. Jim's earlier refusal to be fully open with Huck for fear of losing his freedom is negated in the moment that Jim abandons his escape to save Tom. This moment of seriousness stands out within the farce. Huck in his limited and confused way testifies to Jim's achievement: "I knowed he was white inside, and I reckoned he'd say what he did say" (p. 345). The characters have come to the rescue of the author.

This final section certainly must be read as Twain's conscious or unconscious comment on the difficulty of ending his story. Whether Twain is fully in control of his ending may always be a point of contention.22 What is clear is that the ending is not im- mediately satisfying (Carrington makes our discontent one of the starting points for his argument in favor of the ending's success) and that our dissatisfaction has an ethical basis. We rebel against Tom's treatment of Jim, and even more at Huck and Jim's accep- tance of this treatment, for this is a violation of our community with Huck and Jim, of our acknowledgment of their achieved hu- manity. Our discontent with the final chapters is a disapproval of the narrative's ethical obtuseness. My reading of the ending as a self-conscious admission of the difficulties in writing about true community, of our willingness to blind ourselves to another's hu- manity in order to meet our own self-interests, redeems a great deal of the ending, but not all of it. There is a casualness in both Huck and Jim's acceptance which can be only partly justified. In refusing to close his eyes to the limits of his two protagonists, Twain slights their genuine achievements: he negates the tension between his characters as creatures of stasis who are determined by their situations and as beings whose growth, limited though it is, does follow upon their experience. Our nagging doubts about the success of the ending are grounded in the loss of the tension that the

22Even such critics as Blues and Carrington, who agree that the ending is deliberate, differ on its success: Blues, Mark Twain and the Community, p. 23, sees it as a compromise; Carrington, The Dramatic Unity, p. 153, sees it as a final demonstration of how limited human beings are by their situations and of why there is a consequent need for drama.

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narrative has created. The ending simplifies a complexity, and this simplification becomes an unintended support for the difficulty of maintaining a true feeling that allows us to acknowledge human beings in their full complexity. The novel's ethical concerns haunt the artistry of its end.

The novel's final few pages restore the narrative tension. As the author benevolently doles out rewards at the end, he realizes that there is nothing he can give to Huck. He must leave Huck dissatisfied and yearning for the territory. And if that territory is the place of freedom, then for Huck the territory that he must explore is human relationships. Huck's dissatisfaction at the novel's end is ethical, and the territory he must now move into is one with a larger definition of a human being. Huck's unquenchable desire to be free is the desire to be fully human, and this desire can only be satisfied in a community of equals.

The irony of the ending, which has proven to be a historical irony, is that Jim's freedom, the ending of slavery, did not lead to a new community. Jim's freedom means he will go back to his family, that his efforts must now be to free them. Huck can travel no more with him unless Huck is willing to become an abolitionist, and this is a step that Huck cannot yet take.

Still, the decision he made to free Jim is irrevocable: it has committed Huck to move forward in his defiance of moral codes that still hold him but that he cannot follow. His journey is to a true wilderness, and his success cannot be assured. If anything, his isolation at the end of the novel points to the heroism of his task, and it suggests that Huck's goal, the goal of any free person, is not to achieve a particular end but to struggle in a battle that cannot be conclusively won in order to keep alive the humanity he has discovered.23 Huck's isolation equally signals that the responsibility for community finally and inalienably rests in the individual. The

23Carrington's stress on the influence of situation on behavior and on the inherent need for drama admirably sums up the continuousness of the struggle (The Dramatic Unity, pp. 153-56). But I would extend this insight further by suggesting that an ethical community offers an alternative to a character's being determined solely by situation. Our regret at the end of the novel is evidence of this understanding. We are offered no easy assurance-indeed, the narrative is at pains to point out the difficulties of community-but we do escape from the nihilism of the river communities; and we can do so only by seeing an alternative value to an existence that is wholly situational.

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middle of the novel has argued against conceiving of this individ- ualism as a situation of self-interest. Rather, Huck and the reader have been led to see the individual as an inherent end in himself. The felt ambiguity of the ending is finally a register of the ambiguity of the human situation. One can be free only in a true community, and such communities are only rarely and temporarily achieved. This makes the ethical life one of unending quest. The achievement of Huckleberry Finn is to render this situation in its full complexity: to show both the possibility and richness of community and the rareness and incompleteness of its occurrence.

University of Hawaii at Manoa

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