I’ve lately been diverted into reading all about tricksters and Twain’s 
use of the trickster motif. My recent post regarding Jim, Huck and Pap 
got me thinking about the idea of using Jim as a trickster, at least for 
one instance. This bothered me as I’ve always felt that Huck and Jim 
were two “innocents” making their way through a maze of difficulties, 
none of which were they responsible for. It appears that neither of them 
actually had to make the journey at all, Jim was a “free man of color” 
and Huck’s Pap was dead. Thinking about this I realized that Twain used 
this idea of a traveling innocent in both “Innocents Abroad” and 
“Roughing It”. Twain, himself, was the real trickster. The difference 
(maybe) is that the traveler in IA and RI (Twain, himself) is disabused 
of ideas learned as a youth, Huck and Jim remain the same as when they 
started.

-- 
/Unaffiliated Geographer and Twain aficionado/