Remarks on the Midterm Exam Answers 

    The most successful and eloquent passages in the essays were the discussions of the human need for friendship.  The most common fault was to provide no facts to back up assertions like "The three friends help each other to accept their faults."  Is this even true?  If it is, then there ought to be evidence to prove it.  At the very least, hunting for the evidence ought to assure you that you are not just making this point up.

     I was also dismayed by the passion most students have for filling every square inch of a page with their writing.  If word processors did not force margins upon you, I'm confident that there would be not a speck of white space anywhere on a page.  This practice makes reading difficult, prevents feedback (the stuff you're paying tuition for), and ultimately prevents you yourself from making any changes while you read.

     The most common way of going astray in the exam was to become stuck in the narrative groove. Once you begin to tell a story, you pretty much have to tell it to the end, even though only a part of it may actually apply to the question. If, for example, you wish to show that Huck is intelligent, the temptation is to tell the whole story of his escape from Pap, from finding the canoe to leaving the trail of corn meal, and then, you plod on to detail every lie he tells during his travels. All this takes up valuable time, and when you are done with it, all you have is a bunch of stories that prove he’s smart. Yet if you allowed yourself to refer to just a detail here and there, trusting the reader to know the full story, you might be able to show (1) that Huck can design a complex series of operations that will mislead pursuers away from the river, establish an apparent motive for the attack, conceal his actual means of escape, and secure blood (the pig) to use for the “murder” while disposing of the “murdered boy” in one place (by dragging the sack of rocks) and the actual flesh in another, preventing any dripping of blood to that spot; (2) that Huck typically derives from those to whom he tells his lies the material with which to deceive them, as when he accepts Mrs. Loftus’s belief that he is a runaway apprentice or when he includes a Miss Hooker in his story so as to connect her to the supposed source of the ferryman’s reward, the Mr. Hornback of whose existence Huck was ignorant until the ferryman mentioned him.
      The point is that you need not tell the entire story of how he deceives the ferryboat captain, and the time you save may be devoted to discovering different skills Huck demonstrates. You can arrange your material by kinds of intelligence instead of by stories.
      Let me offer an example of how to answer a question without getting bogged down in narration. This is the question: “Mark Twain had a gift for finding humor in situations that were otherwise serious.  Find examples in Huckleberry Finn.”
      Obviously, you could write an adequate response by simply recording several funny incidents in the novel, the more the better, but how interesting could you make this? What discoveries could you make? But the instant that you abandon the effort to tell the whole story and focus rather on just what is serious and funny in it, and the topic can take on life:

     Humor can flash out from Twain’s pen at the most incongruous moments. When, for example, we are horrified by Pap Finn’s violent racism, we see him bang his shins on a barrel, and our energy, previously focused on anger and outrage at his bigotry, suddenly finds a release in laughter at his expense. Then, when he kicks the tub with the shoe “that had a couple of his toes leaking out of the front end of it,” our laughter redoubles.
      A different effect entirely comes in the scene in which Huck tricks Jim into believing the fog was a dream, which Jim then solemnly interprets, only to have Huck admit his deceit and mock Jim’s credulity. We laugh, yes, but the laughter dies on our lips as Jim draws himself up and with dignity delivers a heart-felt rebuke to Huck for hurting his feelings and humiliating a friend. The customary amusement his coarse dialect tends to excite may perhaps let a superior smirk steal across our features momentarily as he speaks, but we wipe it away in shame as Huck tells of how he humbled himself and begged forgiveness.
      How different is the strange mixture of pathos and hilarity in Huck’s descriptions of Emmeline Grangerford’s sentimental pictures! Take the dead-pet picture in which a birdie lies in a lady's hand, “on its back with its heels up.”  The more pathetic the appeal to sympathy—“I shall never hear thy sweet chirrup more, alas!"—the more raucous our laughter.  The proportions of humor and seriousness may vary, as may the order in which the doses are administered, but the contrast is in all cases what creates the effect.
      The most daring combination of all may be the humor injected into a scene that is meant to be solemn and to stay solemn.  Consider the death of Boggs, with his sixteen-year-old daughter rushing to his aid, too late, and throwing herself down on his dying body in tears while a huge Bible is laid heavily upon his heaving chest! How absurd! How counterproductive! No wonder he expires. But do you DARE to laugh?