“They said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything… They said he could VOTE when he was at home. Well, that let me out.” ~ Pap in Huck Finn
🎧 Listen Here
Examining the Three Faces of Authority Huck Must Escape
How does Mark Twain and his relationship with Father play into what Huck experiences with Pap? This question arises, naturally when we understand the five key archetypes in all story as Booker lays out in the Seven Basic Plots: Father, mother, anima, animus and child. Every human being has a personal father and later, father-figures in their lives and father is also expressed in the wider context of leadership in a society. This reality impacts our writing and we are either conscious of it or not.
All writing, even fictional, emerges from the psyche of the writer who created it.
Samuel Clemens appeared to have a complex but not particularly abusive relationship with his father, John Marshall Clemens who was stern, ambitious, and somewhat distant. But he was an upstanding citizen overall, a justice of the peace who struggled financially but maintained social respectability. He died when Sam was eleven, leaving the family in financial hardship. So while there was some tension, it wasn’t the violent, alcoholic abuse that Pap inflicts on Huck.
Rather than autobiographical, Paps seems to be more about Twain critiquing American society’s failure to live up to its founding-fathers ideals. By the 1880s, Reconstruction was ending and Jim Crow emerging. America was, in many ways, reverting to Pap-like attitudes. Huck’s moral growth represents what America could be if it truly embraced equality and justice.
Tom’s reappearance at the end creates a brilliant and disturbing role reversal, too. While not a father figure, he is a hero to Huck and becomes perhaps the most insidious oppressor because his cruelty is wrapped in play and adventure.
- Tom knows Jim is already free but prolongs his suffering for entertainment
- He turns Jim’s desperate quest for freedom into elaborate theatrical performance
- He prioritizes his romantic notions of “proper” escapes over Jim’s humanity
- He represents the educated, “civilized” society that can intellectualize away human suffering
As discussed in Lit Lesson #51, Huck has just completed this profound moral journey, learning to see Jim as fully human, only to watch Tom, his former hero and role model, treat Jim as a prop in his fantasies. It’s heartbreaking because Huck, still deferring to Tom’s “superior” education and social status, goes along with it.
Tom then embodies how slavery persisted even among the “enlightened” through intellectual games, legal technicalities, and the reduction of human beings to abstractions. His educated cruelty is more sophisticated than Pap’s crude racism, but arguably more damaging because it masquerades as harmless fun.
This makes Huck’s final decision to “light out for the Territory” even more significant – he’s not just rejecting Aunt Sally’s attempts to “sivilize” him, but fleeing a world where even his closest friend can be so callously indifferent to human suffering (as we see in the first act of this book when they mess with Tom while he sleeps).
Tom becomes the face of a society that has learned to make oppression entertaining, which might be Twain’s most cutting critique of post-Reconstruction America.
✍️Some core questions to consider:
(Pick the one that speaks to you and journal a bit on it, bring to class and we’ll discuss in break out rooms)
- Looking at your current story through the lens of the five archetypes (Father, Mother, Anima, Animus, Child), which archetype represents the primary source of opposition or conflict for your protagonist? How might that opposition be more complex than it first appears?
- Like Huck faces Pap’s crude violence, then society’s ‘civilizing’ pressure, then Tom’s sophisticated cruelty – does your protagonist face different forms of the same opposition as they grow? How might the ‘enemy’ become more subtle or insidious?
- Twain likely wasn’t consciously writing about England as the oppressive father, yet that reading enriches the novel. What unconscious influences from your own life might be shaping the conflicts in your story? What ‘fathers’ (literal or metaphorical) are you writing against?
- Huck’s authentic dialect was Twain’s rebellion against literary convention. How might your story’s voice need to rebel against what’s ‘expected’ to serve its deeper truth?
