Huck Choices

Tonic Pop

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. — Anon

Huck Finn is Twain’s magnum opus. We know the gist. It is his story of a runaway boy (Huckleberry) and an escaped slave’s (Jim) travels on the Mississippi plumbs the essential meaning of freedom. The book has caused controversy and conflict in libraries and schools across the US.
“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a dangerous book. As all life manuals are." – Jay Squires – novelist
Toni Morrison (may she rest in peace,) describes and even celebrates “The hell it puts the reader through” as being exactly the point of it.

Ernest Hemingway went so far as to praise Huckleberry by writing that “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”
The morsel that I want to talk about today is a moment that really sets off the overarching theme of freedom. Before we get to that moment let’s talk about the main theme.

What both Huck and Jim seek is freedom. The setting of the Mississippi river gave Twain an opportunity to contrast and throw into conflict the protagonist’s floating log raft, sleeping under the stars style of freedom with the existing civilization along the mighty river.

Both Huck and Jim seek freedom but they have different ideas about what that freedom looks like.

Jim wants freedom from literal slavery and to an existence that will allow him to be with his wife and children.
Huck on the other hand has discovered that while escaping an abusive father to live with Widow Douglas, may have afforded him freedom from his father’s violence, in his mind he was now well fed and well-dressed but with a figurative collar and leash attached to himself.

Then he was kidnapped by his father and he was back to literal captivity in an isolated place where he was physically abused and locked up whenever his father went to town.
Between stimulus and response there is a space.
Huck’s dad going off to town for supplies was the stimulus.
Huck faking his own death and running away from not only the hut but the whole town was his response.
The space between was where his decisions were made.
We have a freedom to choose our responses.

Choice is an indispensable element of freedom.

The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. – Amelia Earheart
Now, the argument could be made, and I’m sure followers of Kantian ethics would make it, that in escaping the clutches of his legal guardian and faking his own death, Huck made a wrong decision being that he was acting dishonestly.

“What’s the use you learning to do right when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?”
Huck muses on this question as he struggles with the dilemma that would see him doing the strictly speaking honest thing (turning Jim over to the escaped slave hunters,) or lying to keep him safe from recapture.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, complicates our standard teachings of right and wrong.

The morality that Huck Finn abides by has more to do with following his heart and his gut instincts than strict definitions of right and wrong.
If Huck hadn’t made that choice in the space between stimulus and response, how might his and Jim’s life ended up?