ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by way of Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition, as representative of nineteenth-century American discourse. Death's dull familiarity for Huck emerges as the novel locates itself at the crux of two intertexts. The first is the Tom-iad, the events of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its many prequels and sequels, which provides the dramatic context and personae to the novel. The second comes in the fourth paragraph when the Widow Douglas tells Huck about 'Moses and the Bulrushers'. When he discovers that the story occurred in the past, Huck claims that he has lost interest in its message because he 'don't take no stock in dead people', especially those who are not 'kin'. Twain's recognition of the value of black mortality as a representational device cuts to the heart of why Chesnutt tacitly acknowledged the dead-end of sentimentalized representations of trauma within an era of expanding American imperialism.
