![]() ![]() ![]() After many difficulties, Huck and Jim escape their tormentors, and with the help of an imaginative rescue by Huck's old friend Tom Sawyer, Jim gains his freedom. Their peaceful existence ends abruptly, however, with the appearance of the King and the Duke, an incorrigible pair of con artists who take over the raft. The fugitives become close friends as they weather storms together aboard the raft and spend idyllic days swimming, frying catfish suppers, and enjoying their independence. Together, they experience a series of rollicking adventures that have amused readers, young and old, for over a century. He is soon joined by Jim, an escaped slave. To escape, 14 year-old Huck Finn fakes his own death and sets off on a raft down the Mississippi River. On it the evasion is understood as an allegory about US race relations during the 20-year period from the end of the US Civil War to the publication of AHF.The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn features the story of a young boy, chafed by the "sivilized" restrictions of his foster home, and weary of his drunkard father's brutality. I rely on an interpretation of AHF that is influential in literary scholarship. This lesson concerns the importance of conscious moral deliberation for moral guidance and for overcoming wrongful moral assumptions. I extract a different philosophical lesson from AHF than either Bennett or Arpaly, which makes sense of the presence of the evasion in AHF. During the evasion Huck behaves in ways that are extremely difficult to reconcile with the interpretations of AHF offered by Bennett and Arpaly. This becomes particularly apparent when we consider the final part of the book, commonly referred to, by literary scholars, as 'the evasion'. Here I argue that the lessons that Bennett and Arpaly draw are not supported by a careful reading of AHF. Two of these philosophers stand out, in terms of influence: Jonathan Bennett and Nomy Arpaly. Huck Finn's struggles with his conscience, as depicted in Mark Twain's famous novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (AHF) (1884), have been much discussed by philosophers and various philosophical lessons have been extracted from Twain's depiction of those struggles. ![]()
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