A COMEDY AT THE END OF THE TRAGEDY–HUCKLEBERRY FINN.

A COMEDY AT THE END OF THE TRAGEDY—HUCKLEBERRY FINN. I think of HUCKLEBERRY FINN as resembling MEASURE FOR MEASURE in having a sharp change in mood from the serious to the comic. Does the ending of Huckleberry Finn spoil the book? It certainly does for a lot of people. This is a paragraph from an essay which joins Jane Smiley and Ernest Hemingway in condemning the ending: “Here the attack on grounds of racism and ‘negative stereotypes’ joins a more literary sort of objection to the last quarter of the book for reducing Jim to a prop for Tom Sawyer’s boyish theatrical ingenuities. Even Hemingway told readers, ‘’The rest is just cheating.’ ‘The last 12 chapters are boring,’ Ms. Smiley writes, ‘a sure sign that an author has lost the battle between plot and theme and is just filling in the blanks.’ I [Seymour Chwast] don’t disagree with this, but at the same time I’m happy to settle for any novel that, like ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ may be only 75 percent great.” I think that the problem is the shift in gears from tragic realism to comedy. The first part of HUCKLEBERRY FINN presents serious moral issues and tragic consequences. Many readers think it is wrong to move from the first part of the book into the comic world of Tom Sawyer where the rules are different and there are no serious consequences.