Graspingness

If Charles Dickens’ Bleak House mocked the do-gooder British woman who lived to rescue the poor and downtrodden, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn elaborates the complicated sad wrongdoings of this fixation. Huck with Jim we see as kind and sensible but not when near Tom Sawyer’s grandiosity. To weigh one’s life against the checklist of high culture or to escape the “sivilizing” – this tension animates the book.