It had been a long time – decades – since I read Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. When I recently picked it back up as a part of a survey of Twain’s works, I was mesmerized. As a boy of ten I didn’t notice the archetypal themes woven throughout the novel. But I do now. Boy do I notice them now.
There are striking similarities between rites of initiation and the journey of Huck down the Mississippi River. He engages in what can only be described as a coming of age ritual in which a boy becomes a man. He flees the world of nurturing women who cared for him and kept him in a sort of confinement until he crossed a threshold out into a larger, turbulent river world. Most particularly, Huck is accompanied by the resident shaman, Jim, who teaches him about life in the larger world as an initiated male. Of course, the river itself is a powerful symbol of passage, taking him from the security of childhood to the danger of adult life, with full exposure to life “East of Eden,” full of the beautiful, devious, exciting and deadly.
Part of Huck’s odyssey includes encountering and coming to terms with the shell of his broken father – and moving beyond him. That encounter includes a kind of trial of terror, so very characteristic of rites of passage. Escorted to the other side of the river – the Illinois side – he lives among the wildness. The raft, though, is the vessel of containment in its ever-flowing movement down river. There are even occasions when the initiate, Huck, gets separated from Jim and has to go it alone, much as many youth must engage in a spirit test or walkabout on their own – testing themselves in a solitary way.
In the end, the young man who was given up for dead is reunited as through a second birth, a rebirth, into adulthood in the larger tribe. This resurrection is the most emblematic aspect of the entire passage, for no one engages in a rite of passage without dying in certain ways and rebirthing in others. So it was for Huck. So it is for all of us.
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