I think a key thing people need to understand about “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” as a novel is that it is, in many ways, a story about trauma and abuse.
The essential plot of the story that Twain tells in this novel is that Huck and Jim are both fleeing from a truly terrible system of oppression and abuse. Jim is fleeing from White Supremacy and Slavery and Huck is, to a certain extent, fleeing from the Patriarchy. They are both victimised and failed not just by their individual abusers (The Widow for Jim and Pap for Huck), but also by the larger social system around them (that last point is especially present at the beginning of the novel when Huck’s life is ruined when Judge Thatcher sends him back to live with his father despite the fact that Huck already had a decent living situation with the Widow Douglas and should be immune to poverty ever again because of what he was doing to help Tom Sawyer in that book). And so neither of them have a place in a society that is cruel and exploits them, hence why they make such natural allies when the time comes for them to flee down the River together towards Cairo.
And this is especially evident in how, yeah, a big part of Huck’s journey throughout this story is about learning to overcome the learned helplessness he has internalised for pretty much his entire life. The kind of worldview where you try to rebel and fight back against the abuse you suffer every day, but you still ultimately default to obedience just as a way to survive. And Twain, of course, draws a subtle but clear link between the mundane domestic abuse enacted by people such as Pap Finn and the vast, nationwide form of domestic abuse that was chattel slavery.
And of course, this is very possibly a big reason why Tom Sawyer can’t quite get his head around helping Jim. To him (a boy raised in a very soft, privileged, and loving household), abuse is just another form of distant fictional villainy no different than dastardly knights and wicked robbers holding princesses and adventurers captive. He has never had to confront the systemic violence of his society either on a personal level or in having to see and empathise with someone who is one of its victims. He filters everything through the lens of his classic adventure stories because he has almost no other lens through which to comprehend the world.
And I am sorry to all the Sawyerberry shippers out there (of whom I am one myself, in whole and complete honesty), but there is a reason why Huck decides to go out West with Jim at the story’s ending rather than staying in Saint Petersburg at the end of the story. For he has in fact realised the fundamental truth that he does not wholly belong in the corrupt and twisted society through which he and Jim have just travelled, and he knows that he must go out West to seek his own destiny relatively free from the constraints of the society in which he has grown up. And in all honesty, it is very likely that the very careless and rather selfish manner in which Tom attempted to construct the rescue of Jim from the Phelps farm is a big reason for this. Though he will probably never fully hate Tom in even the slightest degree and their love for each other will always burn eternal, Huck realises that both of them (Tom especially, in all honesty) need to do a lot of growing up before they can truly become the people whom they were meant to be. Especially since a lot of their love for each other at this young stage of their lives is based on them idolising the other in an unhealthy way (with Tom longing for what he sees as Huck’s freedom and wild-spiritedness and Huck longing for the warmth and happiness and stability that Tom enjoys in his own life) rather than truly and fully understanding each other as whole and complete human beings.
@crusty-the-snowman @disregardcanon @dachi-chan25
