A central work in the national canon, an inspiration for some of the greatest American writers of our century, and the first literary masterpiece in multi-voiced, regional vernacular, Huckleberry Finn is, as Walter Blair observed, « unique in being held in the highest esteem by critics and at the same time prodigiously popular in the United States and throughout the world ».
This study explores the peculiar dynamics of space and time in Huck Finn before shifting to an analysis of the fate of illusion, one of the enduring themes in Twain. Emphasis is placed throughout on the subtlety and complexity of Twain's artistic vision, which projects a world of doublings, reversals, instability, and paradox, drawing all the while on the tremendous evocative force of the river, which, like Huck himself in T.S. Eliot's words, « has no beginning and no end ».