Huckleberry Finn Handout: irony and complexity
  Huck's attitude toward the Duke and Dauphin

Writing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn took Mark Twain several years. He began the project as a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, as another children’s book. But as he wrote, it became more complex; it raises questions that make it a challenging book for readers of all ages. To understand the novel’s complexity, one has to take its dual historical context into account. Twain locates the action in the past, before the Civil War, and before the legal abolition of slavery. But much of the novel speaks to Twain’s contemporary audience, who lived during Reconstruction, a time when the South especially was trying to deal with the effects of the Civil War. The “king” and “duke” owe something of their depiction to the post-Civil War stereotype of carpetbaggers (a derogatory stereotype of Northerners come to prey on the defeated South). Jim belongs, at least partially, to a postwar Vaudeville tradition of the “happy darky,” played on stage by white men in blackface, who used a parodied version of black dialect. This popular stereotype conveyed a white nostalgia, and enacted an imaginary construction of the slave before Emancipation, before the “disappointments” of Reconstruction. Twain tries to come to terms with this nostalgia, but whether he critiques it, or indulges in it, is up for debate.

During his lifetime, Twain was best known for being a humorist, a user of irony and a writer of satire. In this novel, he uses Huck as a relatively naive narrator to make ironic observations about Southern culture and human nature in general. As usual, Twain finds a likely object of satire in religious fervor, in the cases both of Miss Watson and of the visit the “king” pays to the camp-meeting. But the irony in Huckleberry Finn exists at several levels of narration: sometimes Twain seems to aim his irony at Huck, while other times, Huck himself is an ironic and detached observer. For instance, when the rascally “king” and “duke” come aboard the raft, Huck tells the reader:

It didn’t take me long to make up my mind that these liars warn’t no kings nor dukes at all, but just low-down humbugs and frauds. But I never said nothing, never let on; kept it to myself; it’s the best way; then you don’t have no quarrels, and don’t get into no trouble. If they wanted us to call them kings and dukes, I hadn’t no objections, ‘long as it would keep peace in the family; and it warn’t no use to tell Jim, so I didn’t tell him. If I never learnt nothing else out of Pap, I learnt that the best way to get along with his kind of people is to let them have their own way.

This passage ironically undercuts the way we think Huck has been relating to the two frauds; he does not, in fact, “feel right and kind towards” them. In fact, the connections among the foursome on the raft are extremely tenuous. Huck’s choice of metaphor compounds the irony: he compares the two men to his father, and decides to think of them as part of his “family,” throwing the whole notion of “family” into an ironic light. Huck thinks he can avoid “trouble” by pretending not to know that they are frauds, but trouble is all they bring. Huck’s decision to “let them have their own way” is wishful, because he really has no choice. Finally, although Huck seems to condemn them, he recognizes them as liars partially because he is one himselfhe tricks people out of money on more than one occasion. This passage explicitly reminds us that Huck can dissemble and pretend, just as Twain does in his writing. As readers of Huckleberry Finn, we are continually challenged to locate the multiple objects of the novel’s satire.

Overview of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Pearl James. EXPLORING Novels. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003.