To End or Not to End?

Anyone who has read Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn can agree that the ending of the book not quite what they were hoping for. The impromptu arrival of Tom Sawyer, the freeing of Jim, and departure of Huck, have left many wondering what Twain was thinking when he finished writing the novel. Personally, I liked where Twain left it. For me, it didn’t end; rather, the story had only just begun. The ending relates so much to who Huck was and still is: a young, dirty, cheeky, adventurous boy who lived to live. T.S. Eliot, who is somewhat on my side, said because the character of Huckleberry Finn had no beginning or end, the ending must not have one either. On page 288, he says, “Huck comes from nowhere and is bound for nowhere..he is the independence of the vagabond..therefore, he can only disappear..” I agree with Eliot on this. The character of Finn embodies the epitome of someone who thrives off of living life on the edge, or in Huck’s case, on a raft down the River. How can he be held back? It is in Huck’s very nature to discover a new place, roam it for awhile, and then “disappear”. If Twain had left us with a different ending, Huck would not be able to follow his future adventures awaiting him down the River. He went on to say that “It is right that the mood of the end of the book should bring us back to that of the beginning”. Going back to the beginning at the end gives Huck the freedom he has a sought, found, and fought for. Twain’s ending enables him to fight further still.

Marx, one who didn’t quite get what they were hoping for in the end, argued on page 299 that the ending of Twain’s novel was not unified and “lacked coherence and meaning; blurring the end”. He disagreed with Eliot over trying to “justify” the ending and giving it “reason” (pg 300). He felt the conclusion to be frustrating; neither plausible nor reasonable, leaving him completely unsatisfied (pg 302). To him, the quest for freedom that Huck was on could simply not be attained in the wilds of the Mississippi. He said his quest for freedom down the River in the raft was in fact “virtually doomed”. If Marx is right, no one should ever attempt freedom. In the book, the Raft and the River are 2 crucial elements that allow Huck and his companion Jim to escape from their difficult lives and Marx says the raft and the river are clues for us to see they will never succeed in their path to find freedom. He says the raft “lacks power and maneuverability” and cannot carry the “weight” of what it is carrying. You could say the “weight” on the raft is Huck’s companion Jim, a runaway slave travelling with a young white boy down the Mississippi. Perhaps he should have left Jim on a bank somewhere and continued on his journey. You could also say that the River is Huck; unpredictable, wild, and even calm at times. You could read into the metaphors in many different ways but the actions of Huck and his companion remain the same. They are on a quest for freedom. Freedom from abuse, freedom from slavery, freedom from racism, from backwards politics, from stuck-up religion, from the confines of social status, and I believe they reach these freedoms despite the ending in the book.

Some may call Huck the backwoods Peter Pan of the south who is chased by his father with a knife, rather than by washed up pirates. Or he could be called a young Christopher McCandless (Into the Wild); leaving all social society and its restraints behind him as Huck did. The point is, though fiction or real life, these boys all shared one thing in common: they lived to live.