It is a powerful irony that a book about a boy who is running away from his abusive father, who locks him up for days at a time, and a runaway slave with a price on his head should be one of the greatest evocations of freedom in American literature. Nonetheless, the atmosphere of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is unmistakably an expansive one, in which joyful idleness mingles with a sense of possibility and adventure. In between their various escapades, Huck and Jim spend many days simply drifting down the river, fishing, swimming, idling, talking, and doing exactly as they please. It is an idyllic life, contrasting sharply with Jim’s former slavery and with both lifestyles Huck has recently endured: constrained by respectability at the Widow Douglas’s house and locked up in a log cabin by his father.

Huck and Jim are both ignorant and unsophisticated, but they are continually shown to be wiser than those around them. One of the principal reasons for this is that others in the book pursue pointless goals, which demonstrably bring them no happiness: the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons with their senseless blood feud, or the Duke and the Dauphin constantly seeking to cheat people out of their money. Huck and Jim are both in pursuit of freedom, and they enjoy it while they pursue it. They are both indifferent to money. Huck is already rich without wanting to be and has found that the money does nothing but constrain his liberty and prevent him from enjoying simple pleasures. He is running away from the money, and the limitations it placed on his freedom, just as Jim is escaping from literal slavery. At the end of the book, the revelations that both Miss Watson and Pap Finn are dead confirm the freedom of Jim and Huck to live the lives of their choice. In Huck’s case, this is one of absolute freedom, while Jim, no longer a slave, is constrained only by willingly assumed obligations to his wife and children.