[In the following essay, Wieck discusses the river motif in Huckleberry Finn.]

The majestic Mississippi River is of central importance to Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and, over the years since the novel first appeared, an impressive amount of scholarly effort has been expended in evaluating its role. While many perceptive observations and theories have been put forward to explain various aspects of the qualities that the river displays and embodies, relatively little consideration has been given to the fact that neither Huck nor Jim wish, or originally intend, to board a raft and float down the river with the current; for neither character is life on a southward-drifting raft a first choice. Nor is it certain that Twain himself had this in mind for his characters. According to Franklin R. Rogers, “[Bernard] DeVoto assumes that Twain planned from the beginning to take Huck and Jim on a journey downstream to the Phelps's farm, but if such had been Twain's original intent, he would not have destroyed the raft in the first place. … The resurrection of the raft is understandable only if one assumes that Twain had made changes in his plans for the novel.”¹ Rogers further posits that

in its early stages Huckleberry Finn was to be a burlesque detective story. Apparently its denouement was to feature Jim's trial for Huck's murder, a crime never committed; Pap's murder as well as the mock murder were to be connected with the Grangerford-Shepherdson feud in a plot-complex similar to that of “Simon Wheeler” …

However, as Note A-10, urging the resurrection of the raft, indicates, Twain found the structural plan of his second work period insufficient for some reason, possibly because it was not readily expandable. Faced with the necessity of carrying on with a story he apparently had thought was almost finished he sought a means of adding to what he had already written. The device he adopted, as the resurrection of the raft suggests, is … to drop the culmination which would coincide with the feud and to continue Huck's journey downstream in the company of two tramp printers.²

A realization of the fact that neither Jim and Huck nor their creator initially envisioned a raft journey down the Mississippi can thus contribute to our understanding of unplumbed depths in Twain's novel.

After Huck narrowly escapes being killed by his father during one of the old man's drunken binges, he decides to flee in a canoe he has found, informing us that “I judged I'd hide her good, and then, stead of taking to the woods when I run off, I'd go down the river about fifty mile and camp in one place for good, and not have such a rough time tramping on foot” (38). The words “for good” point to Huck's stopping more than temporarily, not to a continual push to put increasingly many miles between himself and his father. A little later, shortly after Huck escapes from the confinement imposed upon him by pap, we also learn that the boy's first act is to hide in his canoe, have a snack, and then “smoke a pipe and lay out a plan.” His line of reasoning is clear:

I says to myself, they'll follow the track of that sackful of rocks to the shore and then drag the river for me. And they'll follow that meal track to the lake and go browsing down the creek that leads out of it to find the robbers that killed me and took the things. They won't ever hunt the river for anything but my dead carcass. They'll soon get tired of that, and won't bother no more about me. All right; I can stop anywhere I want to. Jackson's Island is good enough for me; I know that island pretty well, and nobody ever comes there. And then I can paddle over to town, nights, and slink around and pick up things I want. Jackson's Island's the place.

(41)³

It is evident that Jackson's Island is to serve as a base and that Huck will depend on the town for necessary supplies. He has absolutely no intention of setting off on a river journey.

Jim is another who does not foresee risking his future on the river. His plan calls for him to travel by land rather than water. For Jim, the river is simply an impediment that must be dealt with in a manner that will not betray him. As he explains to Huck: “I'd made up my mine 'bout what I's agwyne to do. You see ef I kep' on tryin' to git away afoot, de dogs 'ud track me; ef I stole a skift to cross over, dey'd miss dat skift, you see, en dey'd know 'bout whah I'd lan' on de yuther side en whah to pick up my track. So I says, a raff is what I's arter; it doan' make no track” (53). Jim at this point decides to swim out to the middle of the river in order to hitch a surreptitious ride on a passing raft; and when he finally manages to catch hold of one and clamber aboard, he “reck'n'd 'at by fo' in de mawnin' I'd be twenty-five mile down de river, en den I'd slip in, jis' b'fo' daylight, en swim asho' en take to de woods on de Illinoi side” (54).⁴ When one of the raftsmen approaches with a lantern, however, Jim's plan to completely abandon the river goes awry. He is forced to slide overboard, swim to Jackson's Island, and survive as best he can for the moment, encircled by the waters of the Mississippi.

It is by this circuitous course that Jim and Huck happen to be thrown together on an island refuge in a manner that owes much to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.⁵ The island itself, however, is depicted as much more than a refuge from the storms of life or from the natural storm from which Jim's knowledge of the actions of birds saves Huck. From Huck's description of the island during the spring rise of the river, we are led to see it as a combination of Paradise and Noah's Ark:

Daytimes we paddled all over the island in the canoe. It was mighty cool and shady in the deep woods even if the sun was blazing outside. We went winding in and out amongst the trees; and sometimes the vines hung so thick we had to back away and go some other way. Well, on every old broken-down tree, you could see rabbits, and snakes, and such things; and when the island had been overflowed a day or two, they got so tame, on account of being hungry, that you could paddle right up and put your hand on them if you wanted to; but not the snakes and turtles—they would slide off in the water. The ridge our cavern was in, was full of them. We could a had pets enough if we'd wanted them.

(60)

Even the catfish Jim and Huck catch while living on the island is a fisherman's dream of almost miraculous proportions. As Huck describes it, the catfish “was as big as a man, being six foot two inches long, and weighed over two hundred pounds. … It was as big a fish as was ever catched in the Mississippi, I reckon. Jim said he hadn't ever seen a bigger one” (65-66).

But Huck has also informed us that there are untamed serpents in this “Paradise,” and the boy's joke with the dead snake, whose mate bites Jim and endangers his life, harbingers the finish to the two friends' idyll. It is, in the end, Huck's desire for knowledge that leads to departure from “Paradise.” Huck, disguised as a girl, decides to “slip over the river and find out what … [is] going on” (66). And the fact that a woman, in this case Mrs. Judith Loftus, is at the source of the information about the impending threat to Jim's freedom, posed by her husband, is not surprising when we consider the many biblical features of Twain's story. Understandably, it is the knowledge obtained from Mrs. Loftus that requires Huck and Jim to flee “Paradise.”

At this stage in the novel Huck and Jim are forced to begin continually using the flow of the river to avoid capture, and only after this is the plan of abandoning the raft and the Mississippi at Cairo, with the intention of boarding a steamboat in order to go counter to the flow of the Ohio and toward freedom, adopted as a new strategy. The critical decision to leave Jackson's Island and drift down the Mississippi is taken unwillingly, is seen at best as a temporary state of affairs, and can by no means be construed as a propitious choice.

The mode of escape opted for by the two runaways must also be considered as less than ideal, since the piece of raft they utilize in making their departure has the major disadvantage of being distressingly sluggish as a means of travel. Huck tells us that “it must a been close onto one o'clock when we got below the island at last, and the raft did seem to go mighty slow” (77). At a later stage of the narrative, it is just this torpid movement that allows the king and the duke in a skiff to catch up with Jim and Huck only shortly after the raft has cast off. The lack of speed at that moment proves crucial as well as frustrating, since Huck believes he and Jim are at last rid of the two frauds and is already rejoicing in the fact that “it did seem so good to be free again and all by ourselves on the big river and nobody to bother us” (259). When the king and the duke manage to reach the raft, however, Huck feels crushed: “So I wilted right down onto the planks, then, and give up; and it was all I could do to keep from crying” (260).

Although we witness several idyllic scenes in the novel in connection with life on a raft, we gradually come to realize that the raft is a dangerously slow, unwieldy object. Even worse, it is subject to being torn from its moorings at critical moments, such as during the risky “adventure” on the sinking Walter Scott or in the frightening fog episode. And, as if the disadvantages already mentioned were not enough, Huck and Jim are also fully aware, in particular after having “watched the rafts and steamboats spin down the Missouri shore, and up-bound steamboats fight the big river in the middle” (77), and after unintentionally missing Cairo in the fog, that it is well nigh impossible to “take the raft up the stream of course” (129). A raft, despite certain agreeable qualities, represents a powerless conveyance always at the mercy of the weather and the current, and, what is more, continually in danger of being destroyed by a steamboat. Despite Huck's claim that there “warn't no home like a raft, after all” (155), existence on the drifting and uncertain collection of logs never quite measures up to the stable, calm contentment that Jim and Huck shared in their lost “Paradise.” For want of an energy source that would enable it to oppose the movement of the current, a raft is only capable of going with the flow.

Nor is the river itself always the most hospitable of places. Beginning with the decomposed body mistakenly identified as pap, Twain populates the river at frequent intervals with hapless victims. There is, of course, pap's own body, found in the floating house, as well as that of Huck's proxy pig. And Buck Grangerford along with his cousin Joe also quickly become lifeless corpses when they seek refuge in the nonpartisan river. Instead of providing them protection, the Mississippi helps make them easy targets for their pursuers by slowing rather than speeding their escape: once in the water they immediately become “sitting ducks” for the men on shore. The three criminals aboard the Walter Scott represent additional sacrifices to the river's relentless flow, while Mary Jane Wilks points to another potential source of victims when she indicates that the usual fate of scoundrels in her town is what she thinks ought to be done to the king and the duke: “we'll have them tarred and feathered, and flung in the river” (240).⁶

At times it might seem that Twain overemphasizes the connection the river has with death, unless we take into consideration the importance of the assorted myths to which he refers, myths that serve as a commentary on the ways in which human beings attempt to relate to the river and its bodies. Huck, for example, “knows” the body found in the river and taken to be pap's has been falsely identified since it was discovered floating face upward. According to the myth, in which Huck firmly believes, women's bodies always float face upward while men's float face downward.⁷ Then, too, there is the belief that bread containing some quicksilver will, in Huck's words, “always go right to the drownded carcass and stop there” (46).⁸ Firing a cannon in the general area where a corpse is suspected to be located is also shown to be a method presumed effective for causing a body to come to the surface (45). All of these beliefs are scientifically unfounded, but the fact that they existed and are mentioned by Twain points to the need that people had for them, a need that must have been based on a sufficiently regular occurrence of death by, or in some way coupled with, the river.

Rivers are not, however, seen from only one point of view in the book. As Mark Twain well understood, rivers represented major thoroughfares in the years preceding the advent of railroads and paved highways. Dirt roads could become impassable during certain seasons or in certain kinds of weather, while rivers, because of their movement, usually remained navigable even in winter, hence the frequency with which towns were built along rivers and, consequently, the importance of the river as a means of linking places and experiences during the period covered in Twain's novel. Lionel Trilling points to that importance in suggesting that

The form of the book is based on the simplest of all novel-forms, the so-called picaresque novel, or novel of the road, which strings its incidents on the line of the hero's travels. But, as Pascal says, “rivers are roads that move,” and the movement of the road in its own mysterious life transmutes the primitive simplicity of the form: the road itself is the greatest character in this novel of the road, and the hero's departures from the river and his returns to it compose a subtle and significant pattern.⁹

Whether or not one accepts Trilling's view concerning the comparative significance of the river as a “character,” his conception of the complexity that Twain's use of the river contributed to the form merits noting.

Careful examination of Huckleberry Finn reveals that Twain's attitude toward the river is certainly not simplistic or one-dimensional. This irresistible flow carries objects and people with it indiscriminately, shows no favoritism, and has parameters that seem much broader than any perception of the river as the embodiment of a single god might offer. It displays, among its myriad qualities, beauty, mystery, power, gentleness, generosity, constant threats, and an often deceptively benign surface, covering an interior that is not easy to fathom. Nor are its islands presented simplistically. Generally they are seen in the novel as safe havens, but Twain does not hesitate to represent them either as a sort of earthly paradise that can serve to bring humans and other creatures together in peaceful harmony, as noted earlier, or as a formidable hindrance to a fervently wished for reunion, as in the fog episode when Jim and Huck drift along opposite sides of an island.

Even crossing the river can be viewed as problematic. Jim, for example, is thwarted in his attempt to escape across the river and leave the threat of enslavement completely behind; this inexorably leads to a multiplicity of difficulties and a “loss of time” for him as he lives on the river in a sort of limbo, neither completely slave nor completely free. Harney Shepherdson and Sophia Grangerford, on the other hand, succeed in crossing the river and thereby escape becoming slaves to an ancient feud mentality.

The river also takes Jim and Huck past Cairo and safety and ever deeper into slave country, but for this it is in no way to blame, unless it is seen in an anthropomorphic light. Huck never sees the river in such a light, however, and his uncomplicated attitude toward this powerful entity seems apparent in a brief comment he makes shortly after the dissipating of the fog, along with its fears. Displaying awe and his habitual lack of prejudice, Huck remarks, “It was a monstrous big river here” (102). For anyone who has ever experienced a feeling of insecurity at being alone in a small craft far from shore, these words are probably not devoid of meaning.¹⁰

As Huck and Jim drift down the Mississippi toward adventures that would make Tom Sawyer's mouth water, were he only aware of them, we may therefore wonder if our heroes are really going to “go with the flow” of that mighty river. Is their fate to move through life and, like a raft, “make no track”? Or will they, like a steamboat or a canoe, be able to go counter to the flow when and where necessary?

The contention of this essay is that the primary thrust of Twain's novel is against “going with the flow” and that Huck's character is defined, and Jim's revealed, step by step as these two chance comrades find themselves in successive situations that require them to act or make a decision in some way running counter to major pressures being brought to bear on one or both of them.

Huck, for example, gradually finds the ways of the widow and Miss Watson, as well as Tom's imaginary “adventures,” wearing on him and feels pressure building in himself to break away, when pap suddenly steps in and momentarily resolves the dilemma by removing him from the claustrophobic environment of the town. Prior to being kidnapped by his own father, however, Huck already gives a hint of what is to come when he realizes, immediately after pap's return to town, that “I warn't scared of him worth bothering about” (23). When pap challenges him with the comment “You think you're a good deal of a big-bug, don't you?” we see the spirit of teenage revolt rise to the surface in the reply, “Maybe I am, maybe I ain't” (23-24). A few pages later Huck expresses similar defiance in explaining that “I didn't want to go to school much, before, but I reckoned I'd go now to spite pap” (29). It therefore comes as no surprise that when pap becomes an actual danger to Huck's existence, the boy is willing to go against both pap and the flow of events by taking his pretended “suicide” into his own hands.

At almost exactly the same moment, back at the widow's, Jim, too, feels compelled to go against a flow of events; in his case it is one that could take him to New Orleans and a worse form of slavery than he has ever before experienced. Huck and Jim thus fortuitously break away from the grasp of a powerful current of circumstances almost simultaneously, and they continue to have this spirit of opposition in common throughout the book.

Huck again evinces his willingness to go against the flow when he makes an attempt at humor in the Raftsmen episode by claiming to be Charles William Allbright, the long-dead subject of one of the tall tales being told. In mocking his own identity, Huck not only challenges the essence of the tale but also makes a wry comment on what he thinks of all the blustery balderdash he has just heard. It is a risky maneuver for a young boy amidst men, but he dares to take the risk, just as he dared to flout pap's authority. He chooses to test his strength at this juncture and does not completely accommodate himself to the flow, unless we see his decision as one that he is certain will produce mirth in the tall-tale tellers by fitting in with the spirit of the moment. Given the situation, however, it would not seem to be a foregone conclusion that the reaction of the men will necessarily be what Huck could conceivably hope for. What does appear evident is that the fourteen-year-old Huck is constitutionally unable to accommodate himself easily to a situation that requires him to submit to an adult authority for which he obviously feels little respect.

Huck's father is also incapable of accommodating himself easily to society for more than brief moments, and his pattern of not doing things according to “reasonable” ground rules, such as not collecting and selling more driftwood at one time than is necessary to enable him to purchase enough liquor for a binge, can be seen as setting a pattern for his son. Huck has difficulty in understanding what he deems to be pap's shortsighted attitude toward the driftwood, but he comes much closer to making peace with society than pap ever does. Huck is, however, pap's son in not hesitating to go counter to the flow whenever his craw gets too full. Just as pap allows the new judge in town to go only to a certain limit in “converting” him before reverting to form, Huck also possesses definite limits as to what he is willing to tolerate.

Evidence of this may be seen in the Wilks episode when Huck sees the misery that the Wilks girls experience after a family of three of their “niggers” is split up and sold by the king and the duke. Huck is able to look on in silence only because he possesses secret knowledge:

The girls said they hadn't ever dreamed of seeing the family separated or sold away from the town. I can't ever get it out of my memory, the sight of them poor miserable girls and niggers hanging around each other's necks and crying; and I reckon I couldn't a stood it all but would a had to bust out and tell on our gang if I hadn't knowed the sale warn't no account and the niggers would be back home in a week or two.

(234)

The kindness that the girls had shown the boy at an earlier moment in the novel stirred him at that point to steal the six-thousand-dollar bag of gold coins from the king and the duke; and this latest display of greed infuriates him enough to cause him to take things into his own hands once again and initiate a plan to once more counter the flow of the situation. Huck's clear revolt against the members of what he calls “our gang” comes about in spite of pap, who has shown by bad example that “the best way to get along with his kind of people is to let them have their own way” (165). In this instance, Huck decides not to let the king and duke “have their own way” and manages to stand firm against the twin flow of forces represented by their direct acts and by pap's indirect teaching.

In what are often considered some of the most dramatic episodes in the novel, Huck goes against the flow of society in trying to save Jim from slavery, and his decisions in this connection all run counter to the practice of the period. In taking his stand, Huck is, as we know, required to oppose received religious beliefs that could find justification in the Bible for holding slaves. He must also go counter to received political practice, which, according to the stipulations of the Constitution, required slaves to be returned to their masters. Huck's opposition to this dual flow exposes him, he believes, to being condemned at death to hell and condemned in life to being regarded as a “low-down Ablitionist” (52), but he cannot find it within himself to accept either the religious or the political precepts that might allow him to avoid such a fate.

With Huck, it is clearly his humane nature that gets in the way when it conflicts with the inhumanity he encounters. He feels that he should oppose the seemingly just hand of nemesis in order to try to save the criminals on the drifting and doomed Walter Scott “so they can be hung when their time comes” (87), and he goes to a good bit of trouble for them. It is against the flow of common sense, perhaps, but Huck cannot completely abandon either the men or his natural instinct to save life. Significantly, he goes with his own flow in an attempt to counteract what the flow of the river threatens to produce. He realizes only too well that he too could be hung one day and thus identifies with the murderers. Such an unexpected reaction reflects a tolerant ability to identify with all levels of imperfect humanity, contradicts the norm, and contributes in a major way to making Huck the universal symbol he has become. He can even find it within himself to try to counter the flow of lynch-mob justice and attempt to warn the king and the duke of their impending tarring and feathering, despite the fact that they have sold his friend Jim into slavery for a paltry “forty dirty dollars.” In both of the above cases Huck applies his own sense of a more humane level of fair play to situations that apparently have already been decided by some power greater than himself. In each set of circumstances he displays the individual strength to resist the flow of what is seemingly preordained.

Twain also indicates that Jim, no less than Huck, ceaselessly strives to counter the flow. This begins early in the book when Jim seeks to carry out his escape by hitching a ride on a raft and must first swim to the middle of the river where, in a symbolic indication of his need and willingness to go against the flow, he significantly tells Huck that he “kinder swum agin de current tell de raff come along” (54). But Jim's opposition to the flow is not displayed solely in physical resistance to the river itself. He firmly opposes the movement of the current in spirit through never abandoning his goal of becoming free all the while he and Huck are drifting south. Jim's overtly rebellious acts, such as challenging Huck's “white” authority in the “Sollermun” and “Frenchman” arguments or daring to indicate that Huck is “trash” in the follow-up events to the fog scene, also add supporting evidence of Jim's strength of character.¹¹ Jim has the courage to oppose the flow of events as long as will be necessary for him to reach his goal of freeing not only himself but also his wife and children. At no point does he alter his stance or display the least inclination to waver on this issue, despite the mistreatment he undergoes at the hands of almost all of the whites with whom he comes in contact. In this manner, Jim is portrayed as just as stubborn as Huck in steadfastly, if quietly, going against what he feels to be the frustrating flow of events.

There are several other characters besides Huck and Jim who also display a willingness to resist the flow of events. Colonel Sherburn, for instance, coolly faces down a lynch mob that has flowed in a seemingly unstoppable mass toward his home. The doctor in the Wilks section dares to go counter to the crowd, the king and the duke, and even the Wilks girls themselves in his attempt to expose fraud. And, whether or not the gesture is seen as a deus ex machina, Miss Watson, who was originally planning to sell Jim, decides instead to oppose the practice of the day and liberate her slave, despite the fact that he ran away and thereby failed to honor the code of obedience that could have been expected to earn him his freedom. In each of these cases, individual courage claims the ultimate prize.

The final break with the flow occurs on the last page of the novel when Huck, after once again trying to find an acceptable existence in living according to Tom Sawyer's “style” and rules, realizes that Tom, with his “bullet around his neck on a watch-guard for a watch,” will, for too long to come, always be “seeing what time it is” (362). That Huck notes and mentions Tom's vanity allows us to understand that at some level he is disturbed by the dreary implication of the new habit.¹² The ramifications of that fact and the possibility of having Aunt Sally as a surrogate for the widow Douglas and Miss Watson provide the motivation for Huck to once again oppose the flow. Huck valiantly attempts to diplomatically say no to further “adventures” with Tom over in the Territory by claiming not to have the “money for to buy the outfit” (361). But when Tom counters with the fact that Huck actually has more than six thousand dollars at his disposal, the scene is set for Huck to react once more in the only way he can conceive of to the kinds of pressures he experienced once before in the early pages of the novel.

In the end, the Mississippi must finally be left behind by both Huck and Jim. Neither character wished at the outset to be on the river, and neither now expresses regret at abandoning it. During a trip that has largely been defined by the current of this “road that moves,” they more often than not have found themselves in conflict with the deceptively “comfortable” but unrelenting motion of its flow. Huck's final decision is a resolute rejection of life on and along the river in favor of the obvious risk involved in heading west onto dry land and into an un-“sivilized” world where, contrary to the flow of accepted logic, the unknown appears less threatening than the known. It seems plain that neither the raft nor the river can offer Huck or Jim an acceptable future, and this should come as no revelation after watching the two friends struggle, each in his own way, so long against the downstream flow.

It is therefore back on terra firma, but in terra incognita, that Huck's struggle promises to continue; Jim's plans for the future, which have long been apparent, also exclude both raft and river. Neither character would appear at this juncture to harbor any illusions, romantic or otherwise, about the Mississippi, but it would not seem beyond imagining that memories of their recent experiences together might not be forgotten in the years to come. For Mark Twain could never forget the Mississippi he came to understand so well as a young man, despite the fact that the flow of his life ultimately separated him physically—although never spiritually—from the movement of that restless river. As a former steamboat captain he never forgot the difficulties involved in traveling upstream against the current, all the while clearly realizing that the responsibility for facing and overcoming those difficulties belonged in the end to only one person on the boat. When Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is regarded from this vantage point, the novel would appear to bear permanent witness to its author's understanding of the continual and complex challenge involved in not going only with the flow.

Notes

1. Parenthetical page references to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Walter Blair and Victor Fischer, Vol. 8, Works of Mark Twain, Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1988.

2. Franklin R. Rogers, Mark Twain's Burlesque Patterns, Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1960, 129.

3. Ibid., 135-36.

4. Twain's spelling of Illinois as Illinoi would seem to have at its root the fact that the word is seen to be spoken by Jim, and can thus be considered eye dialect. Since the s in Illinois is silent, however, there would appear to be no other justification for this misspelling.

5. See Alan Gribben, Mark Twain's Library (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), 1:180-82.

6. In line with the theme of death by water, it is of tangential interest here that the hero of Emmeline Grangerford's poem “Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec'd” also undergoes death by drowning; in that case, however, the culprit is a well he falls into and not the Mississippi.

7. See explanatory notes 14.24-25 in Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Walter Blair and Victor Fischer, for Twain's possible source for this belief, as well as for Dr. Alvin Tarlov's statement concerning his observation of the fact that the bodies of “men, women, boys and girls—they all float face down.”

8. See ibid., 46.3-4. It is also worth nothing that on page C-3 of Mark Twain's working notes for Huckleberry Finn (“Appendix A,” in Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Blair and Fischer, 739, 752), there is a clear indication that Twain was fully conscious of the potential of having bread “cast upon the waters” serve a purpose in his novel: “And bread cast returns—which it don't & can't, less'n you heave it upstream—you let _^cast_^ your bread downstream once, & see. It can't stem the current; so it can't come back no more. But the widow she didn't know no better man to believe it, & it warn't my business to correct my betters. There's a heap of ignorance like that, around.” The editors' comment on Twain's note points out: “This note suggests that Mark Twain considered revising or expanding the passage in chapter 8, where Huck eats the bread that has been set afloat to find his corpse and reflects on the efficacy of prayer” (45.27-47.7 [752]). It might be added that from all indications the speaker of the first-quoted passage is clearly Huck.

9. Lionel Trilling, introduction to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, New York: Rinehart and Co., 1948, xvi.

10. Twain's working notes for his novel reveal other destructive displays he had planned for the river: in the notes for A-6 we find “An overflowed Arkansaw town. River booms up in the night,” and on page B-2 we read “(overflowed banks?)” (“Appendix A,” in Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Blair and Fischer, 728, 735).

11. Andrew Solomon suggests in regard to the “Sollermun” debate that Jim's words here are as much an act of mutiny as running away from Miss Watson was, and the penalty could have been, in fact, just as severe. Jim has now started to break his psychological enslavement, just as he had recently broken from physical enslavement; the importance of this break must not be ignored. It could even be argued that the black man's severing of the identification with a Biblical Hebrew, an identification based on their mutual slavery, is in itself his first step toward psychological freedom. (“Jim and Huck The Magnificent Misfits.” Mark Twain Journal 16 (winter] 1972), 21)

12. See Oehlschlaeger, “‘Gwyne to Git Hung,’” in Robert Sattelmeyer and J. Donald Crowley, eds. One Hundred Years of “Huckleberry Finn.” Centennial Essays. Columbia: U. of Missouri Press. p. 7-11, 124-25.