A Farcical Failure or a Work of Clever Signifying?: Analyzing the Out of Place Ending in Huck Finn

Some critics feel the ending of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a letdown where Twain loses focus, trivializes a serious subject, and loses his nerve in critiquing racism. It is widely considered that Twain’s ending trivializes Jim’s suffering and appears as a missed opportunity to provide social commentary on freedom and oppression in a post-Civil War society still fraught with systemic racism. I can certainly see how the ending can be interpreted as Twain losing focus on what was important and turning Jim’s struggle for freedom into a meaningless joke, but I believe Twain is intentionally signifying here: saying one thing and meaning another. I agree that the ending of Huck Finn trivializes Jim’s humanity, denies Huck’s moral awareness, and turns a realist work into something farcical, but I argue that this was clever signifying on Twain’s part meant to detract readers from the social commentary embedded throughout the book. Signifying was Twain’s way of slipping past his society’s radar for what was acceptable by passing his book off as just a boy’s book of adventure when it was actually making important social commentary under the mask of satire and farce.