We have tended to see Huckleberry Finn as a sort of quest narrative in which the prize is freedom. Huck and Jim are jointly engaged, we say, in the effort to achieve personal liberty, liberty from the bonds of slavery for Jim, from the bonds of prejudice and social conformity for Huck. Huck's is an internalized quest as well as a physical fugue, it would seem; we are witness, presumably, to his growth from childishness and reliance upon received concepts to a more adult independence of being. The trouble with this reading is that it is repudiated by Twain's ending which reveals Jim to be a free man—but not in the least because of the quest for freedom he and Huck have made; as for Huck's self-liberation of spirit, this is quite forgotten as he surrenders all his painfully acquired maturity and relapses into the condition in which he was discovered at the start of the book as the playmate of Tom Sawyer. A generation of critics has strenuously argued that there is no repudiation—for does not Huck vow to "light out for the Territory" in pursuit still of the liberty he has learned to love? Unfortunately, as Henry Nash Smith reminded us, what Huck means there may be only that he will participate with Tom in the plan to "go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns, in the Territory, for a couple of weeks or two." There would seem to be no choice but to conclude that Twain has dropped the quest-for-freedom idea—and perhaps, as Leo Marx claimed, willfully botched his masterpiece.

It seems possible, however, that Twain's narrative is not molded so intentionally and does not betray itself in its