ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the maze motif mainly in terms of its confining function. Literally, during his real-world travels in Europe, Mark Twain's persona finds himself utterly disoriented several times in darkness or in a thick fog, like Huck at the Oedipal crossroads on the river, and struggles to find his way out. Long prior, Sigmund Freud had already commented on Twain's mazelike experience in Europe. Freud once characterized Twain's apparently comical episodes of disorientation as something uncanny. As a consequence, the two families, in their attempt to stop the forbidden marriage, start to kill each other. In the course of the bloody carnage, Huck even experiences the death of a father figure of his own, Col. Grangerford, whose resemblance to Twain's own father is noticeable, according to Walter Blair: Like the colonel Grangerford, John Clemens Twain's father often wore a blue swallow-tail coat with brass buttons.
