Gibbons, Kaye (Vol. 145) - Kristina K. Groover (essay date Spring 1999)
Kristina K. Groover (essay date Spring 1999)
SOURCE: “Re-visioning the Wilderness: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Ellen Foster,” in Southern Quarterly, Vol. 37, Nos. 3-4, Spring, 1999, pp. 187-97.
[In the following essay, Groover contrasts the quests in Gibbons's Ellen Foster and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn.]
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
—Author's note [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]
Mark Twain's disclaimer notwithstanding, Huck Finn's journey down the Mississippi is linked—by motive, moral, and plot—with a pervasive tradition in American mythology and literature: the notion that quest, the lone journey into the wilderness, forms the quintessential American experience. In his 1954 work The...
[The entire page is 7381 words long]
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