Huck

whites were in inner conflict over their belief in a creed of equality and opportunity on the one hand, and their treatment of blacks on the other. Huckleberry Finn, the most influential novel dealing with black and white in America, Twain visualized a white whose conscience tells him it is sinful to rescue a black from slavery.

it would be difficult to find a novel where the characters are more enthralled by money, driven by the search for it, ready to commit violence on its behalf, or more victimized by others' lust for it.

when his conscience besieges him because he does not tell the slave hunters the truth, when he decides to go to hell rather than allow Jim to remain a slave,

Huck and Jim, river and raft. Huck and Jim, floating down the river on their raft. The images are so familiar that it is easy to mistake familiarity for accessibility. In reality, the mythology they evoke is not easy to decipher, given that it identifies legendary black-white amity and unbounded, dreamlike freedom with a voyage that takes a fugitive slave ever further south. The nakedness of Huck and Jim when they are alone on the raft becomes a symbol of how they have shucked off the excrescences of the real world, their clothes, and have come as close as possible to the world of the spirit." The implication that skin color ceases to matter when the two are away from civilization--that they spontaneously move beyond color consciousness and see in each other only a color-free humanity.

In Huckleberry Finn, slavery seems fixed, permanent, while everything else is in flux, transitory. Identities mutate as if in a dream, or nightmare.

Huck, who forever picks up and moves on, is a master creator of identities. Although his personae proliferate, they are all variations on a single theme: the simultaneous creation and destruction of families. Although Huck thus plays a continually changing

...