The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism by Donald Pizer

Author:Donald Pizer [Donald Pizer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780521433006
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

NOTES

* Reprinted from Coming to Grips with Huckleberry Finn: Essays on a Book, a Boy, and a Man by Tom Quirk, by permission of the University of Missouri Press. Copyright© 1993 by the Curators of the University of Missouri.

1 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Walter Blair and Victor Fischer, vol. 8, The Works of Mark Twain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), p. 279. Subsequent references will be to this edition and will be indicated parenthetically in the text.

2 See “Mark Twain, ‘Realism,’ and Huckleberry Finn” in New Essays on Huckle-berry Finn, Louis J. Budd, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 35–59.

3 Shaped as he is by experience, however, Huck remains innocent in an important way. Unlike Colonel Sherburn, say, who has traveled in the North and lived in the South and is therefore able to proclaim on the cowardice of the “average” man (p. 190), Huck’s perspective has not frozen into an attitude. Not only is the narrative point of view of this novel presexual, as has so often been observed, but it is also prepolitical, even preideological. Huck, in his efforts to help Jim, may worry that he may become a “low-down Abolitionist,” but the quality of that anxiety is rather more like a thousand childhood myths – e.g., the worry children have that, having made an ugly face, it will “stick.”

4 Leo Marx, “Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling, and Huckleberry Finn,” The American Scholar 22 (1953): 423–40.

5 Quoted in Walter Blair, Mark Twain and Huck Finn (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960), p. 143.

6 “Mark Twain, Huck Finn, and Jacob Blivens: Gilt-Edged, Tree-Calf Morality in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Virginia Quarterly Review 55 (1979): 658.

7 of Huck and Alice: Humorous Writing in American Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 96.

8 Twain knew this, too; in a cranky moment, he predicted that Huck would grow up to be just as low-down and mean as his Pap.

9 Walter Blair and, more recently, Victor A. Doyno have provided us with full and perceptive book-length studies of the evolution of the novel. See Mark Twain and Huck Finn and Writing Huck Finn: Mark Twain’s Creative Process (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960, 1991), respectively.

10 Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 113.

11 The “Working Notes” for Huckleberry Finn are reproduced in the California/Iowa edition of the novel, pp. 711–61.

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