The purpose of this research is to examine the dev

The purpose of this research is to examine the development of Huck's character, situation, and ultimate fate in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. The overall pattern of Huck's character development is that of escape or planning to escape toward a new state of freedom. But Huck always seems to be running from rather than to something. Although freedom is a general, ideal goal for Huck, the specific form that freedom may take in one situation becomes transformed into a form of confinement. As a result, Huck is without long-term goals, although he repeatedly is engaged in the process of achieving short-term objectives, primarily associated with getting away from whatever situation he is in, whether or not the current situation is of his own making.

From one point of view, Huck's lack of a goal in life or a plan for life is no worse a situation that it should be. He is a kid, and more than this, he has been left pretty much to fend for himself. The effects of being on his own partly explain the affinity Huck has for escape as a way of life. His episode in the woods with Pap is something of an escape because it makes nonsense of the opening conflict of Huck with the civilizing mercies of the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson and the occasional hookey from school (Twain 276). Escape from the abusive and drunken Pap is a matter of more urgency that explains the extra measure of care with which Huck uses pig's blood to make everybody think he is dead.

Taking off down the river with the r

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reality and the confusion and moral analysis that engage Huck in his various adventures point in the direction of moral possibility, symbolized by the river and contained by an America developing in the years that slavery as a cultural institution was losing its credibility. This landscape of moral possibility is articulated in Tom Sawyer's idea for freeing Jim, in order to raft downstream "and have adventures plumb to the mouth of the river, and then tell him about his being free, and take him back up home on a steamboat, in style, and pay him for his lost time, and . . . get out all the niggers around, and have them waltz him into town with a . .. brass band" (449). Huck's response to Tom's idea, from the perspective of Jim's being formally freed, is that things turned out "about as well the way it was" (Twain 449). But like Tom, Huck sees the cleansing potential of the drift downriver, which itself is a plea for social justice, with the river the container of moral possibility. The fact that things turn out pretty well for Jim, Huck, and Tom does not diminish the fact that if the river is a proxy for an experience of escape and freedom, Huck himself is a proxy for an America that, like Huck, is in adolescence and evaluates mat

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