Jim's having already been freed (226). Did Twain really need 48 pages simply to provide a distraction for Tom to make an anonymous exit? Why could he not have made an anonymous exit, lighting out for the territory, after encountering Aunt Sally and her civilizing ways on page 175? The most cogent comment on the ending from Trilling or Eliot comes in the form of the latter's sly question, "If this was not the right ending for the book, what ending would have been right?" (Eliot 334). The suggestion here is that Twain certainly knew better than anybody else what the proper ending of his novel should be. Eliot suggests that the ending "was perhaps unconscious art" (Eliot 334). The ending may not satisfy an academic analyst such as Marx, but it does satisfy the artistic needs of the novel in setting up the "disappearance" of Huck, a character "with no beginning and no end" (Eliot 335). In other words, Twain is dealing with a character learning something crucial about what it means to be a loving human being, whereas Marx is dealing with literary and academic abstractions.
If Trilling and Eliot too easily dismiss the problem of the fake rescue episode, Pearce has nothing to say about the episode, and little at all to say about the last few lines of the novel, the only "endin
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