GARY STEPHENS
79
him nor keep himselffrom helping Tom. While he is above him in moral
intelligence , he remains his accomplice in action . When, for example,
Huck enters the Phelps's farmyard without any notion of how
to
proceed,
he hears the spinning wheel of his fate and trusts
to
"providence"; provi–
dence turns him temporarily into Tom Sawyer, and Huck says , "It was like
being born again, I was so glad
to
find out who I was ." Huck knows that
Tom's way of life is rotten, that his vision of reality is demented: when Tom
accomplishes his "adventure" so well that he gets wounded, Huck can say
wryly , "He had a dream and it shot him ." But Huck sees no alternatives,
even while he recognizes that Tom's way is killing to the spirit . Thus as we
draw back from the spectacle of the conclusion of
Huckleberry Finn ,
we begin
to
see that as wise little Huck floated down the river trusting to fate, luck,
and nature , he was trusting
to
the debris of an old religious impulse that no
longer connected
to
any potent reality .
By the end of the book, Huck realizes that his moral efforts (as, for
example, when he "saves" Jim only
to
find that Jim was already freed) were
a waste of time. In the final paragraph, he can only say:
Tom's most well now , and got his bullet around his neck on a
watch-guard for a watch, and is always seeing what time it is , and so
there ain't nothing more
to
write about. ...
The replacement of the timepiece by a bullet is an exchange which is
emblematic of the deadly meaning of passing time . But since Tom is
oblivious
to
both emblems , there is little more that Huck can do or say .
Twain, confused and attracted by the power Tom represents, can only bring
the book to a conclusion by having Huck beg off and back out. The reader
senses that Twain is compromised: his most moral impulses are embodied
in Huck but thwarted by the mad energy embodied in Tom . As there is no
future in Huck's world, we realize that the mystery which once inhabited
that world has now shifted
to
Tom's . And the reader suspects that as a
consequence of this shift Twain himself feels fooled, and guilty, and a little
helpless.
But in the work of that most typical realist, William Dean Howells,
the conflict between the public assertions and private intuition is more
upsetting and irritating, because Howells found in l.is professed ideal of
realism a mode he felt was adequate to this conflict . Yet the steadiness with
which he pursues that mode actually seems a kind of perversity . I say this
because Howells, in the cause of an ideal he forged with honorable effort,
seems ready
to
bend or break the human characters he uses
to
exemplify it.
