![]() The dual natures of Holden and Huck are relatively easy to describe, but not so easy to portray in pages of fiction. That private boy’s dream, both literal and metaphorical, is to be The Catcher in the Rye, the imaginary, mythical figure who keeps children from harm. ![]() Holden’s private nature is that of the scared child who despairs not just for himself, but for the world, a world that damages children. Holden’s public self has failed so badly that he has been hospitalized. It’s the work of the good reader to discover this nature which is available only through inference, or only after the public self has broken down. It’s a measure of the cruelty of the world, that the private nature must remain hidden. In the territory, we readers infer, there is refuge for the many who have been cast out or have run away.īoth Holden and Huck exhibit two natures, the public nature and the private one. Huck Finn’s second nature is the boy who accepts his own criminality and helps another criminal, the escapee Jim, to “light out for the territory.”olden’s H In the territory, possibly, an escaped slave and a runaway bad boy can live a life that is, if not conventionally good, then at least as good as what surrounds them. The boy whose moral compass sends him off on a raft with the escaped slave, Jim. Underneath that sound lives the sound of Huck’s indomitable spirit, the boy within the boy whose core nature has not been destroyed or even damaged. Huck’s voice is the straightforward, honest sound of self-condemnation, and of acceptance of the morality that surrounds him. He does not speak out against his exile, but his actions make us reject it, and reject the values of those who have cast him out. By accepting the town’s assessment of him, a judgment that comes from the town’s self-righteousness and hypocrisy, Huck demonstrates how completely he has been psychologically damaged. Imagine the novel if the town says Huck is bad, and Huck says Huck is bad, and Huck is, in fact, bad. ![]() Twain speaks to us through Huck about things Huck himself can only dimly perceive. By making Huck a self-described ne’er-do-well and miscreant, and by demonstrating through Huck’s behavior that the boy is actually the opposite of these things, is in fact, quite possibly the best person in the world of the novel, Twain satirizes a corrupt society and condemns the “peculiar institution” of slavery. And this is the key to Twain’s magical use of voice. Huck’s town considers him a bad boy, and Huck does not dispute this. In Huck’s private thoughts to Twain’s readers, Huck is most shocking when he satirizes religion and other pieties of his time. And Huck is not just a boy, he is an outcast whose father is a drunkard and a petty criminal, an abuser of Huck and others. Huck Finn’s voice is strongly regional, and possibly to our modern tastes, a little too heavily phonetically spelled, but Mark Twain’s authenticity in the creation of a Missouri boy of the mid-nineteenth century is not in question. Even the strictest of Presbyterian deacons, once he has recovered from Holden’s casual takings of Christ’s name in vain, pulls the boy into a protective hug. It’s a hard-hearted reader who doesn’t immediately take the young Holden to her bosom. Holden’s voice, radical, even shocking, for the time of its publication, is elaborately casual, mildly obscene (with lots of “for Christ’s sakes”), and it’s the trying-too-hard voice of the adolescent who tells us everything is fine but communicates by other means that just about everything is wrong. In the opening pages of Catcher, Holden Caulfield speaks to us from a hospital bed It’s not long before we infer that this hospital is not for the body but for the mind. You can select at random any pages from these two stories, read them aloud, and get instant recognition from most readers. The two American novels that I considered the most voicey are Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye. In my teaching, I have used the term, “voicey,” to describe novels, usually but not always first person narratives, that exhibit extremes of dialect. Voice is the sound of a human being speaking, and it’s a performance that can include, I believe, the sound of a character’s thoughts. My subject here is voice, which is distinct, I believe from style. The novels, Sweet Dream Baby and Night Letter, are really one story, or the stories of two years in Travis’s life, with a gap of six years separating them. Travis Hollister is, in the first book, 12 years old, and in the second, nineteen. I am not known as a young adult author, but I have published two novels about an adolescent character.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |