The Pilot and the Passenger: Landscape Conventions and the Style of Huckleberry Finn
1956; Duke University Press; Volume: 28; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2922044
ISSN1527-2117
Autores Tópico(s)American Sports and Literature
ResumoN OWADAYS it is not necessary to argue the excellence of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Everyone seems to agree that it is a great book, or in any event one of the great American books. But we are less certain about what makes it great. Why is it in fact more successful than most of Mark Twain's other work? No one would claim that it is free of his typical faults. It descends here and there to sentimentality, buffoonery, and (particularly in the closing chapters) just plain juvenility. Nonetheless we persist in regarding the novel as a masterpiece. How are we to account for its singular capacity to engage us? One persuasive answer to the question has been to say that the book's excellence in large measure follows from the inspired idea of having the western boy tell his own story in his own idiom.' From that seminal idea, it may be said, many of the book's virtues-the convincing sense of life, the fresh lyricism, the wholeness of point of view-follow as the plant from the seed. This approach is persuasive, but it is easier to assert than to demonstrate. My purpose is to establish, on the basis of historical evidence and explicit critical values, certain ways in which the use of the narrator contributed to the novel's greatness. The point to begin with is that it is Huckleberry Finn's story. And what he imparts to it, in a word, is style. The style is unique. To get a vivid impression of its uniqueness one need only compare the novel with Life on the Mississippi and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the other books in which Clemens re-creates the world of the Mississippi Valley. The three are linked in many ways, but above all by geography. In each the landscape is a primary source of unity and meaning. The same countryside, indeed sometimes
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