Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)

257 Pages·2007·1.24 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom

Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
Alice’s Adventures in Frankenstein Persuasion
Wonderland The Grapes of Wrath Portnoy’s Complaint
The Adventures of Great Expectations A Portrait of the Artist
Huckleberry Finn The Great Gatsby as a Young Man
All Quiet on the Hamlet Pride and Prejudice
Western Front The Handmaid’s Tale Ragtime
As You Like It Heart of Darkness The Red Badge of
The Ballad of the Sad I Know Why the Courage
Café Caged Bird Sings The Rime of the
Beloved The Iliad Ancient Mariner
Beowulf Jane Eyre The Rubáiyát of Omar
Billy Budd, Benito The Joy Luck Club Khayyám
Cereno, Bartleby the The Jungle The Scarlet Letter
Scrivener, and Other Long Day’s Journey A Separate Peace
Tales Into Night Silas Marner
Black Boy Lord of the Flies Song of Myself
The Bluest Eye The Lord of the Rings Song of Solomon
Cat on a Hot Tin Love in the Time of The Stranger
Roof Cholera A Streetcar Named
The Catcher in the Macbeth Desire
Rye The Man Without Sula
Catch-22 Qualities The Sun Also Rises
Cat’s Cradle The Metamorphosis The Tale of Genji
The Color Purple Miss Lonelyhearts A Tale of Two Cities
Crime and Moby-Dick The Tales of Poe
Punishment Night The Tempest
The Crucible 1984 Their Eyes Were
Darkness at Noon The Odyssey Watching God
Death of a Salesman Oedipus Rex Things Fall Apart
The Death of Artemio The Old Man and the To Kill a Mockingbird
Cruz Sea Ulysses
The Divine Comedy On the Road Waiting for Godot
Don Quixote One Flew Over the The Waste Land
Dubliners Cuckoo’s Nest White Noise
Emerson’s Essays One Hundred Years of Wuthering Heights
Emma Solitude Young Goodman
Fahrenheit 451 The Pardoner’s Tale Brown

Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
Mark Twain’s
The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn
Updated Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—
Updated Edition
Copyright ©2007 Infobase Publishing
Introduction © 2007 by Harold Bloom
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form
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ISBN-10: 0-7910-9426-X
ISBN-13: 978-0-7910-9426-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mark Twain’s The adventures of Huckleberry Finn / Harold Bloom, editor. — Updated ed.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical interpretations)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7910-9426-X (hardcover)
1. Twain, Mark, 1835–1910. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 2. Finn, Huckleberry
(Fictitious character) 3. Mississippi River—In literature. 4. Boys in literature. 5. Race
relations in literature. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title. III. Series.
PS1305.M28 2007
813’.4—dc22 2006036858
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
The Realism of Huckleberry Finn 7
Tom Quirk
Life Without Father:
The Role of the Paternal in
the Opening Chapters of Huckleberry Finn 27
Harry G. Segal
Huck and Jim on
the Mississippi: Going with the Flow? 43
Carl F. Wieck
Huck, Jim, and the “Black-and-White” Fallacy 55
James S. Leonard
Huckleberry Finn and the Problem of Freedom 67
Sanford Pinsker
Deadpan Huck: Or,
What’s Funny about Interpretation 75
Sacvan Bercovitch
Who Shot Tom Sawyer? 119
Jeffrey Steinbrink
vi Contents
Huckleberry Finn and
Twain’s Democratic Art of Writing 129
Mary P. Nichols
The “Raftsmen’s Passage,”
Huck’s Crisis of Whiteness, and
Huckleberry Finn in U.S. Literary History 149
Peter Schmidt
Reinventing the World and
Reinventing the Self in Huck Finn 171
Bennett Kravitz
“That Night We Had Our Show”:
Twain and Audience 193
Todd Giles
Floating Capital: The Trouble with
Whiteness on Twain’s Mississippi 203
Stephanie Le Menager
Chronology 229
Contributors 233
Bibliography 237
Acknowledgments 241
Index 243
Editor’s Note
My Introduction celebrates Huck Finn as the greatest American image
of the storyteller’s freedom—from time and from fact. The plotlessness
of Huckleberry Finn is studied by Tom Quirk, after which Harry G. Segal
examines the scary figure of Pap Finn, and Carl F. Wieck gives a fresh
perspective upon the Mississippi’s importance in the novel.
The Huck-Jim relationship is seen by James S. Leonard in terms of
Twain’s shrewd manipulation of inarticulateness and illogic to create a highly
articulate narrative and clear thematic logic.
Sanford Pinsker persuasively argues that Twain’s greatest novel is
profoundly subversive because it is truly anti-racist and thus tells us truth
about ourselves.
The distinguished historicist Sacvan Bercovitch paradoxically suggests
that Huckleberry Finn’s humor “lies in its denial of comic relief,” while Jeffrey
Steinbrink wryly demonstrates an accurate distaste for Tom Sawyer, Huck’s
too-respectable sidekick.
Twain’s democratic ethos of writing is found to be incarnated in
Huck-as-narrator by Mary P. Nichols, after which Peter Schmidt traces
the influence of “Huck’s crisis of whiteness” upon subsequent critics and
historians of American literature.
The Huck-Jim relationship is freshly elucidated by Bennet Kravitz,
while Todd Giles finds a dramatic component in the novel.
Stephanie Le Menager concludes this volume with a mordant essay on
Twain’s deep awareness that his American West was just as much founded
upon “international piracy and slavery” as was the American South.
vii

HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
I
After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses
and the Bulrushers, and I was in a sweat to find out all about
him; but by-and-by she let it out that Moses had been dead a
considerable long time; so then I didn’t care no more about him;
because I don’t take stock in dead people.
Huck Finn’s American vision has this in common with Captain Ahab’s or
Walt Whitman’s, that Huck too would strike the sun if it insulted him.
The three best American books—Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, Leaves of
Grass—have in common also that they are each the most American of books.
Twain’s masterpiece is essentially comic, Melville’s is tragic, Whitman’s is
beyond characterization or categorization, except that despite its humor
and its Emersonian hopes for America, we remember it best for its dark
shadows. Huckleberry Finn, shrewd and grim as it is sometimes compelled
to be, remains unique in our national literature for its affirmative force.
Fecund in its progeny—as diverse as Kipling’s Kim, Eliot’s The Dry Salvages,
Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam?—the
book is likely to go on engendering our strongest writers, with only Leaves of
Grass as a rival in that role.
1