ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 1, January 2015
inviting the fleeing Duke and King to escape with them on the raft. The ultimate consequence of what Huck claims to be a reflexive empathy for fugitives – “whenever
anybody was after somebody I reckoned it was me – or maybe Jim” (160) – will be
the Duke and King’s betrayal of Jim back into slavery in Chapter XXXI.
Chapter XIX is the one in which Huck famously observes that “it’s lovely to live on a
raft” (159), and much attention has duly been paid to the lyric raptures of his description of the sunrise that he and Jim get to appreciate from their sanctuary tied up and
hidden by cottonwoods and willows on the bank of the Mississippi. What makes this
hiatus especially salient is not only that it is immediately followed by the commotion
of Huck’s rescuing the Duke and the King, but also that it is immediately preceded by
the horrific conclusion of the Sheperdson-Grangerford adventure, which Huck singles
out as probably the worst trauma of a lifetime that even after only twelve or so years
has already endured plenty: “I ain’t agoing to tell all that happened – it would make
me sick again if I was to do that. I wished I hadn’t ever come ashore that night, to see
such things. I ain’t ever going to get shut of them – lots of times I dream about them”
(154). Intensifying Huck’s horror at having just witnessed at close range the slaughtering of his friend Buck and Buck’s cousin is the fact that Huck is at least partly responsible, having prolonged his stay with the Grangerfords out of curiosity about how the
star-crossed, Romeo-and-Juliet affair between Sophia Grangerford and Harney Shepardson would conclude by postponing escape with Jim even long after he learns that
Jim is alive and had repaired the raft, and, worse, having voluntarily enabled the lovers’ adventure as their go-between, reading the notes that they, believing him illiterate,
entrusted to him: “I reckoned I was to blame, somehow...I ought to told her father
about that paper and the curious way she acted, and then maybe he would a locked her
up and this awful mess wouldn’t ever happened” (154-5).
“Raft” is easily construed as an exceptional state of mind, one that Huck, despite appearances and a great deal of commentary on the novel to the contrary, only very rarely can sustain. It’s not only or primarily that floods and fogs and juggernaut steamboats force Huck to abandon the raft: he more often voluntarily disembarks to have
adventures, unnecessarily reconnoitering the shoreline in drag in Chapter XI, for example, which crude disguise is instantly unmasked, and then, evidently undeterred,
immediately afterward in Chapter XII recklessly boarding the wrecked “Sir Walter
Scott” against Jim’s prudent advice, which ends with Huck and Jim not only again
almost being discovered but probably being murdered by the real robber gang Huck
stumbles upon on board. To try to visualize the unique inactivism of Huck’s posture in
Chapter XIX I show my undergraduates Winslow Homer’s 1873 “Three Boys on the
Shore,” in which boys of about Huck’s age and socioeconomic status – and, I tell
them, doubtless also Huck’s adventuresome inclinations – are immobilized by a superficially unremarkable seascape, their prone posture and dun garments rhyming almost perfectly with both the shape and the color of the rock they’re lounging on. Their
backs are to us, like the couple viewing another superficially unremarkable seascape
in Homer’s 1874 “Moonlight,” which I also show, both implying another, I think
more critical, harmonizing, this one not the banal one between people and nature but a
more subtle, proto-post-modern one between viewers of nature and viewers of art.
Sedentary, comfortable, safe, Huck and Jim enjoy what is for them the uncommon
luxury of a purely aesthetic absorption in the scene.
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