There is a fascinating tension, throughout the narrative, between Twain’s nostalgia for the Old South, which had deeply informed Tom Sawyer, an idealised portrait of a world lost to war and progress that now had, he wrote to his wife on a visit, ‘not a suggestion of romance’ anywhere, and an authorial voice that is much more realistic and critical. 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. 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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