The View from the Raft: Huck Finn’s Authentically Nietzschean Perspective

Abstract

In the thematically central chapter 31 of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck, after vainly trying to pray for guidance with respect to his actions relating to Miss Watson and her slave Jim, reaches the disappointing conclusion that “you can’t pray a lie—I found that out.” This is, of course, a prelude to the climactic turn in Twain’s novel: Huck’s decision to “go to hell” rather than send Jim back into slavery. But in an equally significant sense, Huck’s discovery that he “can’t pray a lie” is pivotal in its own right—as Huck’s profoundly clarified moment of what we might call existentially authentic self-consciousness. He wants to assure God that he will “do the right thing” by writing Miss Watson to tell her where she can find Jim, “but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it.” This plainly echoes Claudius’ dilemma when he tries to pray in Hamlet but finds that, since he is unwilling to give up the fruits of his sin, and is therefore not truly repentant, “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: / Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” But we can find a more proximate, and in that sense more pertinent, analogue in the works—especially The Genealogy of Morals, The Gay Science, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra—of Twain’s controversial contemporary Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche, like Twain, focuses on such matters as “the fictitious and fanciful motives to which men [ascribe] their conduct.”1 He proposes that “the religious person is an exception in every religion,” and concludes that ordinary prayer forms have “been invented for those people who really never have thoughts of their own and who do not know any elevation of the soul or at least do not notice it when it occurs”2—discernments that tie in well with Huck’s experiences both before and after his soul-searching mo-