to escape that entrapment. The result is that the novel essentially arrives at a valorization of social justice by way of critiqte of the conditions governing human experience in antebellum America.
That freedom should be a dominant theme of Huckleberry Finn is manifest in that the narrative unfolds in perhaps the quintessential border state--Missouri. Today, it is contiguous with seven other states, more than any other, and in the 1840s it was a frontier border state, which put it in the vanguard of the shaping of the continental nation. Mark Twain was completely aware of the forces that had shaped the US in the middle of the 19th century, including the opening of the West and the additions to the Union that persistently and programmatically factored in the slavery issue and that caused more trouble than they resolved. He would have known, for example, about the politicization of the abolition movement in the 1830s in particular after the establishment of Henry Lloyd Garrison's Liberator (Wiltse passim); about "bleeding Kansas," or the complex of conflicts in 1854 over whether Kansas and Nebraska could both be admitted to the Union without consideration of the slavery issue (they could not, as the nullification of the Missouri Compromise proved); and about the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, which mandated the return of a slave who had escaped from Minnesota to his master in Missouri and thus became a kind of last hurrah for bureaucratic enforcement of the institution of slavery (Finkelman 282).
Obviously none of these issues figure specifically into the Huckleberry Finn narrative (Kansas-Nebraska and Dred Scott came later in chronological time vis-a-vis the story). Even so, the climate of public opinion in the evolving US of the 1840s is important to understand, and both Huck and Jim have absorbed its lessons. When Jim tells Huck that he has run away from Miss Watson, he explains that he was fearful of being sold South, s...