Authority/Author-ity: Representation and Fictionality in Huckleberry Finn
Despite its installation as a canonical text in American literature during the hundred years since its publication, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn persists in leaving many of its readers with a sense not only of the novel's power and greatness but also oi dissatisfaction with some of its parts. Although it exhibits the complexity and richness typical of other major fiction, Twain's novel is special in requiring readers to grapple with an ending, making up nearly a fifth of the work, that most find problematic and unsatisfactory. As Leo Marx has observed, few readers can avoid the feeling that the Phelps plantation sequence is a falling-off, a mistake on Twain's part, a sequence that does not fit into the larger strategies of the novel (424). To one degree or another, nearly all commentators on the novel acknowledge that the section in which Tom and Huck free Jim from the Phelps cabin seems grafted onto the rest of the novel and that it contrasts, in a nearly fatal way, with major structural and thematic aspects of what precedes it: Huck's moral development, a key thread in the novel, seems to collapse, with both Jim and Huck reverting to comic stereotypes; serious issues about freedom and slavery dissolve into farce; and Tom Sawyer seems to manipulate events cruelly out of a literariness and a romanticism that the bulk of the novel satirizes as foolish