Death and Humor in Huckleberry Finn
Huckleberry Finn can be read as a boy’s adventure novel, as a work of serious literature, as a humorous historical account, as biting social satire . . . I’m sure I could go on. This is a book that has delighted generations of readers – it’s rollingly funny, rife with adventure – and hopelessly morbid. That’s right. I read Huckleberry Finn and it made me think of death. The novel has a strange way of dealing with death. There’s a pretty high body count, yet each individual demise becomes an opportunity for high comedy. We laugh, and the novel will laugh with us. But it won’t cry. Perhaps this was a nod to time and place. As far as the poetry of the time suggests, life in America in the late nineteenth century was not exactly cheerful. Take this poem, published less than a year before Huckleberry Finn, as just one example:
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When I am gone –
Say! Will the glad wind wander, wander on;
Stooping with tenderest touches, yet
With frolic care beset,
Lifting the long gray rushes, where the Stream
And I so idly dream?
I feel its soft caress;
The toying of its wild-wood tenderness
On brow and lips and eyes and hair,
As if through love aware
That days must come when no fond wind shall creep
Down where my heart’s asleep!
Hast thou a sympathy,
A soul, O wandering Wind, that thou dost sigh?
Or is’t the heart within us still
That aches for good or ill,
And deems that Nature whispers, when alone
Our inner Self makes moan?
“Longing”, by Wi…
…ems, amongst others, by Walter Blair’s Mark Twain and Huck Finn. (California: University of California Press, 1960).
[5] Mark Twain. Following the Equator. England: Dover Publications, 1988.
[6] Julia A. Moore. Mortal Refrains: The Complete Collected Poetry, Prose, and Songs of Julia A. Moore, The Sweet Singer of Michigan. Thomas J. Riedlinger, Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998 (5).
[7] Mark Twain. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1999 (124).
[8] Mark Twain. “Post-Mortem Poetry”, The Complete Humorous Sketches and Tales of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider. New York: Doubleday, 1961 (156).
[9] Mark Twain. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1999 (295).
[10] Mark Twain. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1999 (194).
