Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)

Studies - Gabriella Varró: The Adventures of the Minstrel Sign in Mark Twain 's Huckleberry Finn

the influence of the writer's new environment. It is altogether more believable that Twain intentionally takes his material through the structural stages of a minstrel show. If we read the novel in this fashion, the ending appears to be a confused parade of diverse motifs that correspond to the choreography of minstrel shows perfectly. Twain thus seemingly adjusts his novel to the structure of the minstrel show. This, however, does not mean that he fails to draw upon other source materials in his narrative. In connection with Huckleberry Finn many critics identify, for instance, the presence of certain motifs from Afro-American folklore and oral tradition, and it was probably Shelley Fisher Fishkin who argued the case most persuasively/

1 The adaptation of the minstrel show frame in the novel, however, does not automatically lead to the distortion of Jim's personal character traits, for we cannot say that he is exclusively pictured as ridiculous, inferior, or having weaker intellectual faculties. Moreover, as can be seen from the examples above, Jim proves a worthy rival to Huck in their verbal duels, and he oftentimes turns the situations, originally meant to discredit him, to his own advantage. (In Chapter 2, for instance, Tom plays a trick on Jim, which is later turned by Jim into a great tale of having been bewitched, which he applies to evoke the appreciation and gain the esteem of the other blacks; power relations also visibly shift in the episodes of the fog.) Huck Finns minstrel ritual does not result in the stereotyped representation of blacks, although there were many critics who argued so (among them Guy Cardwell, Fredrick Woodard, Donnarae MacCann, etc.). I am inclined to share David L. Smith's views, who affirmed that Twain focuses on "a number of commonplaces associated with 'the Negro' and then systematically dramatizes their inadequacy" (qtd. in Fishkin 81). After all, the burlesque-like closing episodes spell out the bitter conclusion that the years after the Reconstruction merely brought about the parody of the hopes for 6 Fishkin goes so far in the examination of African American traits in the novel as to state that even Huck's figure contains certain black influences. In Fishkin's reasoning Twain created Huck from the mixture of the personal traits of "a black child named Jimmy, a black teenager named Jerry, and a white child named Tom Blankenship" which, as the critic claimed, "involved a measure of racial alchemy unparalleled in American letters" (80). 274