that can wholly determine the course of human peregrination . . . never wholly charitable; it changes its pace, it shifts its channel (Eliot 332).
Eliot also asserts that the River "makes the book a great book" (Eliot 334). The river, indeed, is a unifying symbol not only of this novel but of Twain's other work as well. In this regard, the Mississippi is "Mark Twain's river," associated with the "big questions" that Twain's whole literary output raises:
[A]nd this omnipresent sense, this fearful impact of the elements and the sheer problems of survival run through all Twain's books as they had run through his life. He was a pilot; he was a soldier; he was a miner; and, worst of all, he was a writer. He had to fight for his life at every moment of his existence (Bezanson 262).
Jim and Huck are engaged in a survival game, not just because Huck aids Jim in surviving slavery itself when they first start down on the raft but because they have to learn to respond to whatever new experience and opportunity for either growth or harm the next bend in the river offers. The River, in Eliot's view, lends substance and weight to the accumulated impact of each succeeding episode. As he puts it, "The River cannot tolerate any design, to a story which is its story, that might interfere with its dominance" (Eliot 335). Thus, if it is the character of Huck through whose eyes Twain observes the world, it is the character of the River through which Huck experiences the character, both good and bad, just and unjust, of the ante-bellum American South.
Moses's interpretation of the structure of Huckleberry Finn also assigns uncommon symbolic importance to the Mississippi River, suggesting as well that it has the narrative stature of Dante's Inferno. While he acknowledges the cultural gulf between Twain and Dante, he claims that there is universality in both Huckleberry Finn and the Inferno, with the powerful symbol of place serving to unify the a...