Questioning Huck's Transformation: Analysis of Huckleberry Finn's Ending

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, is considered a great American novel. However, over the years many readers and critics have found fault with the ending. One critic states, “Eliot feels the end of the book rounds off the story and brings the reader back to the level of the childish, boyish beginning, while Trilling sees the close of the novel as a device which permits Huck to fall back into the anonymity he prefers”. Many question why Huck leaves Jim and falls back into his childish ways, after building a meaningful relationship with Jim throughout their adventures. In the beginning, Huck views Jim as a slave who deserves to be punished for escaping but Huck undergoes a transformation throughout the story Huck moves to view Jim as a friend and equal to him in everyway.

While Tom was brought us in a well-mannered and high society family, Huck’s childhood in ravished with poverty and lack of decorum. As the story unfolds, Tom views Jim’s escape as a game by composing radical escape plans while knowing that Miss Watson has died. Tom knows that Jim is a free man, yet he muddles with his fait by allowing him to remain in captivity. Tom develops an extravagant escape plan for him by stating, “They always dig out with a case-knife- and not through dirt, mind you; generally it’s through solid rock. An it takes them weeks and weeks and weeks, and for ever and ever”. Chapter 35. Tom does not see Jim as a real person; he tells Huck that in order for the escape plan to be fun it must be complicate. Huck sees the fault in Tom’s plan because he cares for Jim and wants him to escape the binds of slavery. Therefore, Huck’s moral expansion has placed himself outside the standards and principles of society at this time. I believe the ending is appropriate because Huck sees that Toms moral code is different than his own and he reverts back to his old ways by escaping the tied of society yet