Anchored in the middle of James Cox's Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (1966) is a statement which, if true, reduces virtually all of the criticism on Huckleberry Finn to rubble:

[The] moment, when Huck says "All right, then, I'll go to hell," is characteristically the moment we fatally approve, and approve morally. But it is with equal fatality the moment at which Huck's identity is most precariously threatened. In the very act of choosing to go to hell he has surrendered to the notion of a principle of right and wrong. He has forsaken the world of pleasure to make a moral choice. Precisely here is where Huck is about to negate himself—where, with an act of positive virtue, he actually commits himself to play the role of Tom Sawyer which he has to assume in the closing section of the book. To commit oneself to the idea, the morality of freeing Jim, is to become Tom Sawyer.

This provocative (which of course means perverse) reading must be answered, not because it is eccentric, but because it unhinges the moral structure which has been assumed by the book's defenders and detractors alike. Having spent their ammunition on the border war of the ending, most 20th-century critics take for granted the proposition that the "go to hell" passage in Chapter 31 is the moral center of the book, and that Huck makes the right choice. Much of the large library of Huckleberry Finn criticism is a series of footnotes to the