SOURCE: Park, Clara Claiborne. “The River and the Road: Fashions in Forgiveness.” American Scholar 66 (winter 1997): 43-62.

In the following essay, Park traces similarities between Huckleberry Finn and Rudyard Kipling's Kim.

When Lionel Trilling collected the essays that became The Liberal Imagination, was it chance or subliminal recognition of affinity that caused him to place his discussions of Huckleberry Finn and of Kipling side by side? Five years separated the essays—that on Kipling written in 1943, in response to the then recent essays by Edmund Wilson and T. S. Eliot (“critical attention … friendlier and more interesting than any he has received for a long time”), that on Huckleberry Finn in 1948. No interior references united them. If Trilling remembered Kim (Kipling's “best book” he'd called it in a long and appreciative paragraph) when he identified Huck Finn as a “picaresque novel, or novel of the road” and quoted Pascal's “rivers...