Huck Notes

After reading the last ten chapters of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, many readers are left feeling like Henry Fleming, running into a field of retreating Union soliders crying "Why--why?" (Crane, 66). Ernest Hemingway believed readers should skip the end of Mark Twain's classic. The final ten chapters seem so different from the previous thirty-one. Why did Twain seemingly redefine the characters of Huck and Jim? Why did Twain allow Tom Sawyer to control the end of Huck's book? More simply, why? Throughout most of the novel Huck struggles with his appropriate relationship with Jim, who slowly recognizes and asserts his freedom. However, at the end of the novel morality and freedom issues are apparently set aside in order for Tom Sawyer to have another childish adventure and to minimize Jim's equality. While at first it appears Twain is putting aside the major themes of the novel in order to satisfy his segregationist 1880's audience, he actually uses the ending episode to continue the extended conflict Huck has with society. Though the ending does question Huck's moral development, it does not forget the major theme of Huckleberry Finn: the hypocrisy of "sivilized" society. In Henry James' "Daisy Miller: A Study," the last image of Daisy that the reader sees is that of a "raw protuberance among the April daisies" that is located "in an angle of the wall of imperial Rome, beneath the cypresses and thick spring flowers" (p. 151). This seemingly unhappy ending forces the reader to question why it is that Daisy Miller dies. The short answer to this question is that "the pretty American flirt" dies simply because she is foolish and enters a known nest of Roman-fever-bearing mosquitoes at night (p. 102). Yet, if one reads James' story very closely, this short and simple answer proves to be utterly insufficient because it does nothing to address the one aspect of Daisy's being that the narrator and Winterbourne constantly reiterate during the work: her inherent sense