(2 of 2)
The True Adventures also does away with most of the original's minstrel-show banter and the historical references that some critics have felt were inappropriate—coming from the mouth of a 14-year-old school dropout. But Seelye does his largest alterations on Huckleberry Finn's ending, which, through the years, has caused the most serious critical harrumphing. In Mark Twain's original, the Duke and the King sell Jim out as a runaway slave for $40. Shortly afterward, Tom Sawyer makes a convenient entrance into the story, and he and Huck plan to free Jim and take off for more adventures on the river. After a good deal of rigmarole, however, Tom reveals that the escape plan is only a game because Jim's owner, Miss Watson, has died and willed the slave his freedom.
Even such an admirer of Huckleberry Finn as Ernest Hemingway, who viewed the book as the beginning of modern American fiction, thought the ending was a cheat. Less forgiving critics felt that Mark Twain contrived the upbeat conclusion as a piece of benign claptrap to solve the matter of Jim's freedom.
Seelye's revised ending is sympathetic to Hemingway, although it goes a bit farther. Jim drowns while trying to escape a band of bloodthirsty, reward-hungry rednecks, and Huck is so disgusted and depressed that he doesn't give a damn what happens next. Seelye not only repeals the theme of boyhood innocence in much the same way that J. D. Salinger did in Catcher in the Rye, he also dents the romantic American notion of limitless freedom on an endless frontier. The "true" Huck doesn't eagerly "light out for the Territory ahead of the rest," as Mark Twain concluded, he funks out in the Mississippi mud.
Seelye's ending is in keeping with Mark Twain's brand of easy cynicism. But to get lost in such critical preoccupations is to buck the refreshing main current of Seelye's book. For the professor was clearly out to have a little extracurricular fun—not the least of which was the excuse to reread the original Huck Finn.