CMAT 2017

Critics of Mark Tawain's novel Huckleberry Finn view the protagonist's proclamation "All right, then go to hell" in chapter 13 as the story's climax. Twain's novel lent itself to such radical interpretations because it was the first major American work to depart from traditional European novelistic structure thus providing critics with an unfamiliar framework. The remaining twelve chapters act as a counterpoint commenting on if not reversing, the first part in which a morality play receives greater confirmation. Huck's journey down the Mississippi represents a rite passage, in which the character's personal notions of right and wrong come into constant conflict with his socially constructed conscience by the various people and situations the protagonist encounters.

The novel's cyclical structure encourages critics to see the novel's disparate parts as interlinked; the novel begins and ends with the boys playing games. Granted, this need not argue to an authorial awareness of novelistic construction, however it does facilitate attempts to view the novel as a unified whole. Nevertheless, any interpretation that seeks to unite the last few chapters with remaining book is bound to be tenuous. This is not because such an interpretation is unnecessarily rigid, but because Huckleberry Finn encompasses individual scene of the protagonist's self-recognition that are difficult to accommodate in all - encompassing interpretation. In this respect the protagonist can best be linked to the Greek tragic figure, Oedipus.