Literary articles - Mark Twain 2025

“And Then Think of Me!” Huckleberry Finn and Cognitive Dissonance

John Bird

Abstract

Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has often been read as a psychological novel, but the role of the concept of cognitive dissonance has not been fully explored. This articles explores the novel in terms of cognitive dissonance, showing how it drives the characters, especially Huck Finn. Huck's relationship with Jim is a series of encounters with cognitive dissonance, culminating in the novel's climax in Chapter 31. Cognitive dissonance can also explain the reactions of readers and critics, as well as explain society's attitudes in Twain's time and in ours.

Keywords: Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, cognitive dissonance, social psychology

In Life on the Mississippi, written when we was working on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain wrote, “When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him—met him on the river” (163). Even though he did not use the term “psychology,” only beginning to come into use at the time, Mark Twain was a master of psychology, which has long been noted by readers and critics, perhaps starting with James M. Cox in his 1954 article “Remarks on the Sad Initiation of Huckleberry Finn.” In many ways Huckleberry Finn could be called a psychological novel. But there is a concept from social psychology he also intuitively understood that has not been fully explored: cognitive dissonance. He could not have known the term, introduced by Leon Festinger in 1957, but he certainly understood the concept: “a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent” (Tavris and Aronson 13). Festinger gave the example of a smoker who knows that smoking is unhealthy. “He might,” Festinger writes, “simply change his cognition about his behavior by no longer smoking” (6). Alternatively, “he might change his knowledge about the effects of smoking” (6). The smoker “might simply end up believing that smoking does not have any deleterious effects, or he might acquire so much ‘knowledge' pointing to the good effects it has that the harmful aspects become negligible. . . . He might try to find facts and opinions of others to support the view that smoking is not harmful” (6). As social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson note, “Dissonance produces mental discomfort, ranging from minor pangs to deep anguish; people do not rest easy until they find a way to reduce it” (13). The elaborate mental gymnastics the smoker puts him- or herself through are examples of self-justification, which cognitive dissonance theory tells us is our common and universal way of dealing with the unpleasant feeling. Festinger proposes two basic hypotheses:

1. The existence of dissonance, being psychologically uncomfortable, will motivate the person to try to reduce the dissonance and achieve consonance.

2. When dissonance is present, in addition to trying to reduce it, the person will actively avoid situations and information which would likely increase the dissonance. (3)

Cognitive dissonance and the resulting self-justification run throughout Huckleberry Finn, helping us to better understand the characters, especially Huck, but also to better understand the society the novel portrays, as well as ourselves as readers and critics. Reading Huckleberry Finn with a focus on cognitive dissonance is fruitful and revealing.

No character in the novel is immune from cognitive dissonance and its effects. Consider two polar opposites: Jim and Pap. Early in the novel, Jim experiences cognitive dissonance when Tom hangs Jim's hat on a limb while Jim sleeps under a tree. Jim's reaction to this inexplicable event, what Festinger calls an example of “logical inconsistency” (14), is to invent an elaborate fantasy, a self-justification, about witches putting him in a trance and riding him all over the state, then to New Orleans, then all around the world (7–8).

When Pap first encounters Huck in his new clothes at the widow's fine house, the dissonance of seeing his formerly ragamuffin son in finery makes him relieve his mental discomfort in anger and threats: “‘You've put on considerable many frills since I've been away. I'll take you down a peg before I git done with you. You're educated, too, they say; can read and write. You think you're better than your father, now, don't you, because he can't. I'll take it out of you'” (24). Even more telling, his tirade against “govment” results from seeing “‘a free nigger, from Ohio; a mulatter, most as white as a white man'” (33). The man's white shirt, shiny hat, fine clothes, gold watch and chain, and silver-headed cane—added to the fact that “‘he was a p'fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything'” (33–34), and even worse, “‘They said he could vote, when he was at home'” (34)—make Pap confront two very contradictory cognitions. His image of blacks as subhuman, beneath even his own barbarous, degenerate self, is starkly contradicted by the reality of a refined, elegant, educated, free black man. Rather than reducing the dissonance by accepting this professor as proof that people, even black people, can possess intelligence, education, and refined manners, Pap resorts to self-justification, asserting his supposed white superiority by shoving the professor out of the way, then blaming “govment” for not being able to “‘take a-hold of a prowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted free nigger'” (34)—epithets that describe not the professor, but Pap himself. Mark Twain portrays here a classic psychological study of cognitive dissonance and its effects. Pap is so profoundly disturbed by the presence of this learned man that he must reduce his extreme cognitive dissonance by embarking on a hypocritical rant. As Tavris and Johnson argue, self-justification “is also the reason that everyone can see a hypocrite in action except the hypocrite” (4). Self-justification like Pap's may seem to be the same as lying, but since it is actually lying to oneself, it is, Tavris and Aronson note, “more powerful and dangerous than the explicit lie” (4). Twain allows Pap to expose his hypocrisy to the reader, his incessant self-justification a marker of the depth of his cognitive dissonance.

Since Huck is the psychological center of the novel, it is with him that we see Twain's portrayal of cognitive dissonance most clearly. Huck experiences dissonance constantly, starting in the first chapter, when the widow makes him wear new clothes, keeps him cramped up inside, makes him “grumble a little over the victuals; though there warn't really anything the matter with them” (2). She won't let him smoke: “She said it was a mean practice and wasn't clean,” even though she takes snuff; “of course, that was all right, because she done it herself ” (3). Huck recognizes the widow's hypocrisy: she surely must have experienced cognitive dissonance in making Huck refrain from her own habit, and Huck tacitly understands her unspoken self-justifications. Huck's response to the dissonance produced by rules and manners is to light out—a precursor to the novel's ending.

When Huck is confronted by things he does not understand, he experiences cognitive dissonance that he tries hard to overcome. In Chapter 3 Huck says, “Then Miss Watson she took me in her closet and prayed, but nothing come of it. She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it” (13). Huck's habitual response is to test the things he cannot understand: “But it warn't so. I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks. It warn't any good to me without hooks. I tried for the hooks three or four times, but somehow I couldn't make it work. By and by, I asked Miss Watson to try for me, but she said I was a fool. She never told me why, and I couldn't make it out no way” (13). The subsequent paragraph reveals to us the depth of Huck's cognitive dissonance: “I set down, one time, way back in the woods, and had a long think about it. I says to myself, why don't deacon Winn get back the money he lost on pork? why can't the widow get back her silver snuff box that was stole? why can't Miss Watson fat up? No, I says to myself, there ain't nothing in it. It stands to reason there ain't nothing in it” (13). This sets up a pattern that will persist for much of the rest of the novel: when cognitive dissonance becomes too troublesome for him, he simply dismisses the vexing problem. His repeated phrase “don't take no stock in” is his way of not thinking about anything he finds troubling, thus dismissing his dissonance.

He has a similar response in the same chapter, when he joins with the other members of Tom Sawyer's Gang to “ambuscade” what Tom's spies say is “a whole parcel of Spanish merchants and rich A-rabs” (15). When it turns out that that they have attacked a Sunday school picnic, and Huck confronts Tom about the discrepancies, Tom Sawyer experiences cognitive dissonance himself. Rather than admit he was merely indulging in make-believe, at best, or lying, at worst, he makes up an elaborate string of self-justifications, saying the whole thing was done through enchantment by magicians. Tom's remarks throw Huck once more into cognitive dissonance. When Tom tells Huck that genies come when an old tin lamp or an iron ring is rubbed, Huck tells us, “I thought all this over for two or three days, and then I reckoned I would see if there was anything in it” (17). Just as he did when confronted by the mysteries of prayer, Huck must attempt to ease his dissonance by practical trial: “I got an old tin lamp and an iron ring and went out in the woods and rubbed and rubbed till I sweat like an Injun, calculating to build a palace and sell it; but it warn't no use, none of the genies come” (17). He arrives at a practical and sound conclusion: “So then I judged that all that stuff was just one of Tom Sawyer's lies. I reckoned he believed in the A-rabs and the elephants, but as for me I think different. It had all the marks of a Sunday school” (17). Once again, when faced with something he doesn't understand, Huck's remedy for cognitive dissonance is dismissal.

In almost all his encounters with civilization on his journey, Huck encounters more mysteries that induce cognitive dissonance: the Grangerfords and their feud; the King and the Duke; Colonel Sherburn; the circus and the clown; the Wilks girls and his attempts to save them from being cheated. One could almost read the journey down the river as a journey through cognitive dissonance.

If the relationship between Huck and Jim forms the novel's thematic and moral center, that relationship causes for Huck the deepest and most significant cognitive dissonance. Huck expresses great shock when he hears that Jim has run away; his startled and sudden ejaculation of “Jim!” is evidence of profound dissonance, which he quickly dismisses when Jim reminds Huck that he promised not to tell. Huck's response shows him running quickly through several stages of self-justification: “‘Well, I did. I said I wouldn't, and I'll stick to it. Honest injun, I will. People would call me a low-down abolitionist and despise me for keeping mum—but that don't make no difference. I ain't agoing back to tell, and I ain't agoing back there, anyways'” (52–53). That quick dismissal will return repeatedly, forming several of the crisis points in the novel.

Back to that first trick on Jim, this time from Huck's perspective. At first, Tom wants to tie Jim to a tree, but Huck objects—not out of any feeling for Jim, but out of fear that Jim might wake up and the widow will find out Huck has escaped from his room. On Jackson's Island, Huck increases the stakes of Tom's tricks by placing a dead rattlesnake in Jim's blanket. When the snake's mate bites Jim, Huck expresses no remorse, not to Jim, and not even to the reader, showing that at this point in the relationship he still views Jim closer to the way Tom Sawyer and Pap would view him, as an object of fun, as less than a white man, unspoken self-justifications he has learned from those close to him and from his society in general.

Another way Huck shows he is closer to Pap is when he makes selfjustifications for stealing, or, as Pap calls it, borrowing, already a marker of self-justification. The extended passage might seem merely comic, but it very clearly shows the conflict Huck is experiencing between the way he was raised by Pap and the new attitudes he had begun to pick up from Widow Douglas: “Mornings, before daylight, I slipped into corn-fields and borrowed a watermelon, or a punkin, or some new corn, or things of that kind. Pap always said

it warn't no harm to borrow things, if you was meaning to pay them back, s ometime, but the widow said it warn't anything but a soft name for stealing and no decent body would do it” (79–80). As Huck and Jim talk over this dilemma, they embark on a chain of self-justification: “Jim said he reckoned the widow was partly right and pap was partly right; so the best way would be for us to pick out two or three things from the list and say we wouldn't borrow them any more—then he reckoned it wouldn't be no harm to borrow the others” (80). Their solution to the problem is a classic example of the way we reduce cognitive dissonance: “So we talked it over all one night, drifting along down the river, trying to make up our minds whether to drop the watermelons, or the cantelopes, or the mushmelons, or what. But towards daylight we got it all settled satisfactory, and concluded to drop crabapples and p'simmons. We warn't feeling just right, before that, but it was all comfortable now” (80). Huck's “all comfortable now” is a clear indicator of his mental state, and his coda about crabapples and persimmons once again shows how the hypocrisy of cognitive dissonance is evident to all but the person undergoing it: “I was glad the way it come out, too, because crabapples ain't ever good, and the p'simmons wouldn't be right for two or three months yet” (80).

A big change in Huck and Jim's relationship comes in Chapter 15, when they are separated by the fog and Huck convinces Jim that he has dreamed it all. This is a powerful moment in the novel, in part because of the depth of Huck's cognitive dissonance, the deepest he has experienced up to now. First, we see Jim experiencing strong dissonance; in fact, Huck nearly defines cognitive dissonance in his narrative:

Jim looked at the trash, and then looked at me, and back at the trash again. He had got the dream fixed so strong in his head that he couldn't seem to shake it loose and get the facts back into its place again, right away. But when he did get the thing straightened around, he looked at me steady, without ever smiling, and says:

“What do dey stan' for? I's gwyne to tell you. When I got all wore out, wid work, en wid callin' for you, en went to sleep, my heart wuz mos' broke bekaze you wuz los', en I didn' k'yer no mo' what become er me and de raf'. En when I wake up en fine you back agin, all safe en soun', de tears come en I could a got down on my knees en kiss yo' foot I's so thankful. En all you wuz thinkin' 'bout, wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren's en makes 'em ashamed.” (104–5)

The gap in the narrative that follows lets us imagine the extremity of Huck's resulting dissonance and the amount of self-justification he must have gone through: “It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger—but I done it, and I warn't ever sorry for it afterwards, neither. I didn't do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn't done that one if I'd a knowed it would make him feel that way” (105). The key words here, I think, are “humble myself to a nigger.” To do so goes against everything he has been taught—by his father, by Tom, by every other member of white society. The very thought of “humbling himself to a nigger” creates for Huck such extreme cognitive dissonance that he must take that full fifteen minutes.

That scene would seem to settle some matters in Huck's mind, but in the very next chapter, when Jim mistakenly thinks he is close to freedom, Huck's suspension of dissonance over Jim's running away comes back to him: “It hadn't come home to me, before, what these things that was that I was doing. But now it did; and it stayed with me, and scorched me more and more” (123). When faced with such dissonance, Huck immediately resorts to self-j ustification: “I tried to make out to myself that I warn't to blame, because I didn't run Jim off from his rightful owner; but it warn't no use, conscience up and says, every time, ‘But you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a paddled ashore and told somebody'” (123–24). When Jim talks about buying his wife and children, and if he couldn't buy them, “get an Ab'litionist to go and steal them” (124), Huck's dissonance reaches a peak: “It most froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn't ever dared to talk such talk in his life before” (124). Huck decides to reduce his dissonance by turning Jim in, but Jim's comments as Huck paddles away turn the dissonance up a notch: “Pooty soon I'll be a-shout'n for joy, en I'll say, it's all on accounts o' Huck; I's a freeman, en I couldn't ever ben free ef it hadn' ben for Huck; Huck done it. Jim won't ever forgit you, Huck; you's de bes' fren' Jim's ever had; en you's de only fren' ole Jim's got, now” (125). We can't see inside Huck's mind, but what he tells us gives us a very good idea of the mental struggle he is going through:

I was paddling off, all in a sweat to tell on him; but when he says this it seemed to kind of take the tuck all out of me. I went along slow, then, and I warn't down right certain whether I was glad I started or whether I warn't. When I was fifty yards off, Jim says:

“Dah you goes, de ole true Huck; de on'y white genlman dat ever kep' his promise to ole Jim.”

Well, I felt sick. But I says, I got to do it—I can't get out of it. (125)

But he can't turn Jim in, and he can't get out of his dissonance. He is “feeling bad and low” when he gets back to the raft, but then he experiences more contradictory cognitions: “Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on—s'pose you'd a done right and give Jim up; would you felt better than what you do now? No, says I, I'd feel bad—I'd feel just the same way I do now” (127). “I was stuck,” Huck says: stuck in cognitive dissonance. He finds a solution to reduce that unpleasant feeling, his usual solution: “I reckoned I wouldn't bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time” (127).

As many others have noted, Huck's crisis of conscience here is a prelude to his deepest crisis of conscience, in Chapter 31, which is also his deepest confrontation with cognitive dissonance. Disheartened that the King and the Duke have sold Jim “for forty dirty dollars” (268), he sits down in the wigwam to think. The extreme dissonance of the situation leads him to a chain of justifications: “it would be a thousand times better for Jim to be a slave where his family was, as long as he'd got to be a slave” (268); then rejecting that because Miss Watson would sell him down the river and because “everybody naturally despises an ungrateful nigger” (268). In a key moment, he turns from justifying the dissonance from Jim's point of view to his own: “And then think of me!” (268). His long string of justifications begins with an ironic echo of the trash scene on the raft: “It would get all around that Huck Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom; and if I was ever to see anybody from that town again, I'd be ready to get down and lick his boots for shame” (268). He openly admits he is selfjustifying, saying, “I tried my best to kinder soften it up somehow for myself, by saying I was brung up wicked, and so I warn't so much to blame” (269). But more dissonance comes: “‘There was the Sunday school, you could a gone to it; and if you'd a done it they'd a learnt you, there, that people that acts as I'd been acting about that nigger goes to everlasting fire'” (269).

When he says, “It made me shiver,” we know how intense and uncomfortable his cognitive dissonance is. What follows seems like action, but it is actually just another string of self-justifications. “And I about made up my mind to pray,” he says—“about” being the key word—“and see if I couldn't try to quit being the kind of boy I was, and be better” (269). He kneels down, but the words won't come: “It was because my heart warn't right; it was because I warn't square; it was because I was playing double” (269). Even though he does not yet recognize it, part of him cognitively recognizes his deep allegiance to Jim. We see the dissonance again when he says, “So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn't know what to do” (269). The solution, of course, is self- justification: “At last I had an idea; and I says I'll go and write the letter—and then see if

I can pray” (269). He decides to write the letter not to do what he mistakenly sees as the right thing, but to relieve his dissonance, which we can see in his next comment: “Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt light as a feather, right straight off, and my troubles all gone” (269). He hasn't done anything, but his dissonance is already gone. And even more so after he does write the letter: “I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now” (269).

But that feeling cannot last. Huck has constantly delayed resolving his cognitive dissonance about Jim and freedom, and as he “set there thinking,” his cognition turns to Jim's many acts of kindness, specifically focusing on moments of previous dissonance like Jim coming out of the fog, and ending with the memory of not turning Jim over to the slave traders, when Jim “said I was the best old friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now” (270). The climax of the book now comes, as well as the climax of Huck's long battle with cognitive dissonance: “It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: ‘All right, then, I'll go to hell'—and tore it up” (269–70).

In a sense, Huck tearing up that paper is the literal representation of tearing up his cognitive dissonance. At long last he has decided to act on what he has deferred from the moment he met Jim on Jackson's Island. Mark Twain called this scene the conflict between “a sound heart and a deformed conscience,” an apt description, but at the center of that conflict is a profound struggle with cognitive dissonance.

We usually stop here in any analysis of this pivotal moment, but Huck's next words actually exhibit a very important aspect of dissonance theory:

It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head; and I said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn't. And for a starter, I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog. (271)

A number of psychological experiments have shown that when people make a decision, in other words, when they make a choice based on resolving dissonance, they tend to go overboard in justifying the choice they have made, fully rejecting the discarded alternatives. Going “the whole hog” is precisely what we do after making a choice—because we don't want to let ourselves fall back into the unpleasant state of dissonance.

If he had followed through on this plan, we would have a very different novel and a very different ending. But Tom Sawyer shows up in the next chapter. There are numerous examples of cognitive dissonance in the Evasion: Huck not being able to reconcile Tom acting as “a nigger stealer”; Jim being torn between his deference to the white Tom and his resistance to being cruelly mistreated; Tom becoming confused between his devotion to romantic book escapes and the reality of Jim's situation, solved in one instance by calling a pick-axe a case knife; Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas in a constant state of cognitive confusion. But I turn to the cognitive dissonance experienced by many readers of the ending. The contradiction between Huck's apparent moral growth and his deference to Tom jars many readers, enough for them to pronounce the novel fatally flawed. We can see dissonance in Ernest Hemingway's famous pronouncement about the novel. He begins with a clear statement: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” But he goes on: “If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating.” Even with that disclaimer, he dismisses his dissonance to return to his initial claim: “But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since” (22). At the height of New Criticism in the 1950s, formalist critics lauded the novel as a masterpiece, but they had to justify their dissonance over the ending. Lionel Trilling called the episode “too long” and “a falling-off,” but he still found in it “a certain formal aptness” (326). He argues with a further justification: “Yet some device is needed to permit Huck to return to his anonymity, to give up the role of hero, to fall into the background which he prefers, for he is modest in all things and could not well endure the attention and glamour which attend a hero at a book's end. For this purpose, nothing could server better than the mind of Tom Sawyer with its literary furnishings” (326). In “Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling, and Huckleberry Finn,” Leo Marx rebutted such New Critical arguments by focusing on the novel's morality, arguing that the ending “jeopardizes the significance of the entire novel” (337). The debate over the ending endures, evidence of the cognitive dissonance it provokes in readers. More recently, a New Historicist approach embraced by many, including myself, has emerged: that Mark Twain was writing about his own time rather than the time of the novel, making an elaborate satire of the absurdities of Reconstruction. Perhaps those of us who read the ending that way are merely reducing our own dissonance by making excuses for Mark Twain: we admire him as a person and writer, and we admire the novel, so we indulge in justification for the contradictions we face when we read. And after making that choice, as dissonance theory tells us we will do, we go “whole hog” on such interpretations. Perhaps. Hard for me to judge, since I am inside the dissonance myself by accepting the argument.

In any case, dissonance theory explains why Huck acquiesces to Tom, and why that acquiescence upsets so many of us. The “pyramid of choice” concept applies here: two people start out very close together in attitudes and actions, as Huck and Tom are at the beginning of the novel, at least in their attitudes toward blacks. As each person makes different choices, they both take steps down the pyramid and slightly farther apart from each other. Eventually each person reaches the bottom of his side of the pyramid and is very far apart from the other (Tavris and Aronson 32–37). That happens to Huck in the course of his relationship with Jim: he is all the way at the bottom and to one side of the pyramid, in effect an abolitionist, very far from Tom's position and the position he once held. In fact, the appearance that Tom has also made this slide to what Huck mistakenly sees as a low moral position causes Huck great cognitive dissonance. But even more, our perception that Huck has reached a far superior moral position on the pyramid, but that he almost immediately moves back to Tom's immoral position, upsets us: cognitive dissonance inside and outside the narrative.

In a broader social and political sense, the novel represents the profound cognitive dissonance of an entire society. The contradiction between a nation founded on freedom for all and a nation that allowed some people to be held in slavery created extreme dissonance that could not be easily resolved. The slaveholders and those who supported them, North and South, went through all sorts of self-justification: they argued that the Bible sanctioned slavery, and they quoted Scripture to back that up; they used science, or actually pseudoscience, to argue that blacks were inferior to whites; they argued that blacks were not even really human beings. We see this attitude when Huck tells Aunt Sally about a supposed steamboat explosion. “‘Good gracious! Was anybody hurt?'” she asks. Huck says, “‘No'm,' then adds gratuitously, ‘Killed a nigger.'” This pious Christian woman's immediate response shows us how deeply ingrained is the societal lie: “‘Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt'” (279). As a white Southerner born in the year of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, I was taught by my well-meaning parents and by my teachers a string of self-justifications for slavery: most slave owners treated their slaves really well; slavery was wrong, but the economic system of the country depended on it; the North was just as bound up in slavery as the South (in large part true); the Civil War was not a war over slavery, but over states' rights; and on and on. One of the enduring strengths of Mark Twain's achievement in Huckleberry Finn is the way his comic novel exposes the tragic flaws in that kind of thinking, without overtly making the argument. Like the central theme, cognitive dissonance is submerged, yet readily apparent to be perceived.

When Huck vows to light out at the end, he says it is “because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it” (362). In another sense, he has been plunged into cognitive dissonance again, something he can't stand. “I been there before,” he says—and he knows how much trouble it is to escape that very unpleasant condition.

Works Cited

Cox, James M. “Remarks on the Sad Initiation of Huckleberry Finn.” Sewanee Review 62.3 (1954): 389–405.

Festinger, Leon. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson, and Company, 1957.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Green Hills of Africa. New York: Scribner, 1935.

Marx, Leo. “Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling, and Huckleberry Finn.” American Scholar 22.4 (1953): 423–40. Rpt. in Norton Critical Edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 2nd ed., edited by Sculley Bradley et al. New York: Norton, 1977. 318–28.

Tavris, Carol, and Elliot Aronson. Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me):

Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. New York: Harcourt, 2007.

Trilling, Lionel. “The Greatness of Huckleberry Finn.” Introduction to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1948. Rpt. in Norton Critical Edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 2nd ed., edited by Sculley Bradley et al. New York: Norton, 1977. 336–49.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In The Works of Mark Twain, Vol. 8. Edited by Victor Fischer and Lin Salamo, with the late Walter Blair. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003.

Life on the Mississippi. New York: Harper Brothers, 1883.