Say it, Jim: The morality of connection in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

College Literature, Winter 2002 by Bollinger, Laurel

The American literary tradition has often been defined by its moments of radical autonomy-Thoreau at his pond, Ishmael offering his apostrophe to "landlessness," Huck "light[ing] out for the Territory ahead of the rest" (Twain 1995,265). In fact, Twain's novel is often taught as the text that epitomizes this tradition, with Huck held up as its exemplar: a boy courageous enough to stand against the moral conventions of his society, to risk Hell itself rather than conform to the "sivilizing" process of communities he rejects.1

Yet such a focus belies an alternate strand in the tradition: moments of radical connection that call into question not just the value but even the possibility of autonomy. The passage from which my title is drawn illustrates this point. At the very moment Jim's freedom seems most in crisis, when Tom's injury puts the escape on hold while Huck goes for the doctor, the two characters speak as one through Jim's voice. Knowing Jim will say what they both think, Huck asks Jim to say it: "`No, sah-I doan' budge a step out'n dis place, `dout a doctor, not if it's forty year!"' (1995, 251).While the moment certainly contains troubling elements, we must acknowledge the profound, almost telepathic connection between characters in this encounter.2

That the connection involves a moral choice is particularly appropriate in this novel that hinges on such moments. This particular decision reveals the two major threads of morality examined in the novel. Emerging from a set of assumptions most readers (and teachers) of the novel probably expect, Jim's argument prevails: he claims that the risk to Tom's life trumps his own need for freedom, that the doctor must be fetched even if it means Jim stays where he is-a slave-for "forty year." This proposed timeframe brings Jim to the moment of Twain's composition, representing Jim's willingness to extend his slavery not just past an historical end Jim cannot foresee but quite possibly for the remainder of his life. In his mouth, the words become a willing sacrifice--one Huck cannot offer on his behalf.

Yet Huck's reticence to speak isn't simple courtesy, nor, certainly, a test of Jim, who has already proven himself a morally admirable figure. Huck's silence reveals an alternate moral code that has, in fact, driven him through the novel: a code based on the maintenance of relationships, not on an abstract hierarchy of values. Huck never moves into the realm of "abstract" morality; he never asserts a conviction that when two moral principles come into conflict, one will have priority because of the nature of the moral principle itself. Instead, he acts strictly through his sense of commitment to his friends-and in the moment when Tom is shot, Huck finds himself on the horns of a dilemma. Both friends have powerful and immediate claims upon him.Yet Huck has no recourse to abstract assumptions to establish that preserving Tom's life is the highest moral obligation at that moment-or even the reverse, that Jim's need for freedom takes priority over the arguably small risk to Tom's life (or perhaps only to limb, as he's been shot in the leg rather than in a more vital region). My point is not that one value or another should have priority but rather that Huck's decisions are not based on abstract moral reasoning. His loyalty to both friends means that, in the face of their conflicting needs, Huck is paralyzed. Huck needs Jim to say what must be done because if Huck says it himself, the demand for a doctor betrays Jim's need for freedom-and so betrays Huck's relationship with Jim. Only after Jim insists on the doctor can Huck act: "[S]o it was all right, now, and I told Tom I was a'going for a doctor" (1995, 251).The key is "now": only after Jim has said "it," acknowledging the demand Tom's injury places on them, does the moral hierarchy become "all right," releasing Huck to respond accordingly. The hierarchy of values Jim describes-that liberty must give way when a life is at stake-doesn't free Huck to act. The principle Jim articulates is considerably less compelling for Huck than is Jim's implicit assurance that Huck's actions will not compromise their friendship.

This interpretation of such a pivotal moment makes more pressing a question that continues to plague us as readers and teachers of the novel. If Huck's relationship to Jim really is the centerpiece of the text, a friendship demanding that Huck step outside the conventional morality of his era, how can we account for its trivialization during the evasion sequence at Phelpses' farm? In other words, how can we make sense of the ending? Even if we don't simply take "The Weak Ending of Huckleberry Finn" as a given, as Richard Hill suggests most modern critics do (1991, 492-93), any reader interested in Huck and Jim must see that allowing Tom to dictate the terms of the escape-complete with his boyish, bookish ideas on how such an escape ought to play out-violates not just the profound connection of"Say it, Jim," but of any friendship based on mutual respect. Huck cannot recognize Jim as an equal or a friend and yet allow Tom to amuse himself at Jim's expense. For reasons ranging from a concern with Huck's moral growth to the reassertion of racism implied by Jim's treatment and voicelessness in the escape sequence, any number of critics have considered the ending what Leo Marx labeled "a failure of nerve" on Twain's part, an evasion of the very direction the novel seemed to be taking (1986, 19).3 The novel is often taught this way too, for suggesting that Twain has "got it wrong" by the end eases our discomfort with the painful elements of the novel's conclusion. I would argue, however, that a morality of connection functions throughout the text, and-paradoxically-that the problematic ending emerges not from a shift in that ethic, but from its very consistency. To see this ethic at work in the novel also demands that we reconsider the book's status as an icon of individualism, recognizing the deeper connectiveness underlying Huck's character and, with him, the novel as a whole. Such reconsideration also has implications for our teaching of other icons of autonomy, and perhaps for further consideration of the mythic status of American individualism.