Research on Huckleberry Finn & On the Road

In so doing, he appears to use it as a metaphor for discussing the means by which Huck's story unfolds. If it is Huck who gives the give its distinctive linguistic and ethnical style, the River, says Eliot, "ives the book its form." He continues:

But for the River, the book might be only a sequence of adventures with a happy ending. A river, a very big and powerful river, is the only lifelike force that can wholly determine the course of piece 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 emblem not only of this novel but of Twain's other cultivate as well. In this regard, the Mississippi is "Mark Twain's river," associated with the "big questions" that Twain's exclusively literary output raises:

[A]nd this omnipresent sense, this fearful stupor of the elements and the vapourish problems of survival depict done 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 back up Jim in surviving hard workerry itself when they first start brush up on the raft but because they have to learn to collide with to whatever new experience and opportunity for either gain or har

Moses's interpretation of the social system 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 pagan gulf between Twain and Dante, he claims that there is catholicity in both Huckleberry Finn and the Inferno, with the powerful symbol of place component part to unify the action of the story. In particular, he sees a analog between Dante's and Twain's treatment of evil, as expressed in the no-account showcases that Jim and Huck meet on their way down river: "Huck's adventures are a progression from contact with and endangerment by incontinence, through violence, through fraud" (389).

The encounter with the Duke and the Dauphin is a case in point. At first, Jim and Huck sympathize with the depths to which they say they have fallen, "majestying" them until their concern with Jim's slave status, together with their progressively worse behavior as they move down river--selling the estate and slaves of Peter Wilks, collecting a reinforce for turning Jim over to the authorities, and so on--lends meaning to Huck's statement that it didn't spend a penny him long "to make up my mind that these liars warn't no kings nor dukes, at all, but just low-down hum-bugs and frauds" (Clemens 102).

m the next flex 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 every 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.

other key truth is how impermanent the American psyche is, at least that part of the psyche that lives not in the groom neighborhoods or even the entrenc
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