Heretical Fictions: Religion in the Literature of Mark Twain

He could never understand why and how a supposedly benevolent God would punish his creation for committing acts which resulted not from free will, but were preordained.

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Despite his resentment of Calvinist thought, he was never able to free himself from its impact and it manifested itself in the following tenets of his countertheology: In the following six chapters, Heretical Fictions turns to the texts which the authors selected as their primary sources to support and illustrate their ambitious claims. Chapter two, on Roughing It , makes the case that the book has been misunderstood and underestimated as an entertaining but insufficiently organized travel book.

As a matter of fact, the hoax constitutes the central element in Roughing It because it also serves to trick his readers into accepting the illusory attractions of travel and life in the Far West. The chapter devoted to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer continues and advances previous critical attempts to move the book away from its reputation as simply an entertaining boys book and to establish it as a serious work of fiction.

This is achieved by an intensive and detailed analysis of illustrative textual examples which highlight patterns of violence, horror, and despair, culminating in a portrait of life in a repressive small town. In contrast to the predominant readings of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as a nostalgic depiction of a boyhood idyll, the present interpretation suggests an unsettling vision of human life that is brought about by a religious creed that denies the possibility of escape from a hopeless destiny Like its two preceding chapters, the chapter on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn seeks to distance itself from most of the traditional readings of the novel.

Freshly Pressed: Heretical Fictions

While Berkove and Csicsila acknowledge that the book is concerned with freedom, they reject the notion, originally advanced by Leo Marx, that it affirms freedom and claim that the last ten chapters fail to adequately sustain the main theme By way of a systematic and cogent argumentation the two authors explain why, at the end of the book, neither Huck nor Jim are truly free. With reference to the historical facts, the authors point out that Jim was not a free man, but a free man of color—an important distinction which meant that Jim was still vulnerable to all kinds of white aggression Once this realization has sunk in, the supposed thematic inconsistencies are resolved and reveal themselves as features of a coherent, if tragic vision of human existence.

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Although Twain provided them with a sufficient amount of clues to understand that there was no way for a happy ending, his readers tended to cling to the romantic surface level of the text. They argue that there was never a chance for Hank Morgan to actually succeed in reforming and improving the medieval world with the help of his supposedly more advanced and superior knowledge and skills from the nineteenth century.

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As is evidenced in the final chapter, in which the two authors engage with a selection of his late writings, Twain ultimately returned to his Calvinist countertheology. In their final paragraphs; the authors conclude that Twain was neither an atheist nor a misanthrope. They see him as an individual entrapped by a powerful religious creed, one that had terrible implications for the notions of human freedom and happiness.

Heretical Fictions - Berkove and Csicsila

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