Mark Twain begins The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with the line “that book [The Adventures of Tom Sawyer] was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mostly.” (1) From the beginning, Twain established lies as a key element in the text. It becomes clear as we read that the lies in the novel are separated into four main groups: childish lies, vicious lies, innocuous lies, and noble lies. The types of lies which a character tells help to define him or her, and to separate that character from others.
Childish lies are primarily used for entertainment. Tom Sawyer uses lies to make his cavorting more exciting, and to lure his friends into accompanying him on his adventures. Tom tells Huck that “he got secret news from his spies that next day a whole parcel of Spanish merchants and rich A-rabs was going to camp down…all loaded down with di’monds. (14) In actuality, they crash a Sunday school picnic. Tom’s childish lies get more and more out of control as the book ends, when he manipulates the escape attempt of an already free slave, resulting in his own near death after being shot. However, Tom is not alone in his use of this type of lie. Huck too uses childish lies as a source of entertainment, when he tricks Jim into thinking that a night spent lost in the fog searching for each other is actually a dream.
Vicious lies, or self-serving lies, are told in order to better one’s own position through an attempt to harm others. These are the lies told by the duke and the king, whether it’s the King who is goading money out of churchgoers to “work his way back to the Indian Ocean and put in the rest of his life trying to turn the pirates into the true path” (145), or the pair posing as relatives from a distant land, or the duke lying to Huck himself, who had cared for them over hundreds of miles; these two characters lie consistently and constantly, and care little about the harm they cause to others. This is made achingly clear when the King turns Jim in as a runaway slave from a southern plantation for a forty dollar bounty.
Innocuous lies are lies that cause no harm in their telling. These would be lies used to protect oneself, as Huckleberry Finn uses them. Every time that Huckleberry Finn encounters a new group of people, it is the innocuous lies of identity that keep him from being found out after faking his death. One example of this is when Huck goes into town dressed as a girl to gather information. It is necessary to lie to keep from being discovered, and the information that he gathers while in town helps to keep Jim from being captured. These innocuous lies, although frequent, are lies of necessity, and serve to define Huck’s view that “a body that ups and tells the truth when he is in a tight place, is taking considerable many resks.”(204)
The last group of lies, noble lies, is best described as lies told to protect another. These are the other types of lies commonly told by Huck Finn, in his attempts to keep Jim free from harm. Perhaps one of the best examples of this was when Huck lied and said that his father was sick with smallpox on the raft, which scared away two white men who wished to come aboard and look around. The lie, which saved Jim, also served to benefit Huck, who didn’t want to be viewed negatively for helping Jim. It also earned him forty dollars from the men, who pitied him for his sick father. Huck, it should be pointed out, is the only character in the book who tells noble lies.
As is defined earlier, a reader can define a character by the types of lies they tell. Tom sawyer is easily identified as an immature character, whose primary interest lies in manipulating situations so as to make them more fun. Mark Twain does much to make Tom Sawyer an unlikable character, who thinks little of others as he works to make his grand adventure. His lies border on vicious, but harm others only indirectly, and are told out of childish desires for excitement, not in any attempt to cause harm to others.
Jim lies only once, in the beginning of the book, when he explains tells the other slaves that “witched bewitched him and put him in a trance, and rode him all over the State” (6) after Tom and Huck move his hat from his head to a low hanging branch while he was asleep. He is telling what could be considered either a childish lie, or an innocuous lie, in that it doesn’t in fact harm anyone, yet helps no one but Jim. Jim’s lie does little to define him as a character, due to the fact that he lies so little throughout the book, and the fact that his actions through the book define him as a noble character as is described by Huck after Jim is captured:
I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping…and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now. (235)
The Duke and the King are quite obviously vicious characters. The lies they tell are only one example of this classification. Their manipulation of Huck and Jim, their betrayal and sale of Jim to the Phelps’, and their general backstabbing of each other sends as clear a message as their lying does, but Huck does not realize their true rascal nature until he hears them lie to the Wilkses.
Huck is in himself an interesting character. He lies more than any other character in the book, and thinks very low of himself for helping Jim, and resigns himself to hell for his actions, yet, looking at the lies he has told, it is clear that he is a noble character. He has not told any lies which are vicious in nature, and the only childish lie he tells, which is to trick Jim, he immediately regrets. He tells numerous lies which are very noble, and do much to keep Jim safe. He even attributes his lies to some higher power, saying that he “went right along, not fixing up any particular plan, but just trusting to Providence to put the right words in my mouth when the time come; for I’d noticed that Providence always did put the right words in my mouth if I left it alone”. (241) The same god that he feels will damn him to hell for helping Jim is the one he trust to help him lie. This in itself says something to the character of Huck and the lies he is telling.
By analyzing the lies told in Huckleberry Finn, a reader can learn much about the characters. As is evidenced here, the difference between hero and villain, urchin and angel, can be seen clearly through the lies one tells. It distinguishes Huck from Tom, the Duke and King, and Jim. It defines clearly the type of person that each of these individuals is, and the role that they play in the story.
