Huckleberry Finn
a violet pressed inside
when I was someone else
Joshua St. Claire
FYI: L1 of the haiku, "Huckleberry Finn," alludes to the protagonist of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by American writer, Mark Twain. This reference immediately evokes themes of escape, moral conflict, and the formation of identity.
There is a poignant imaginative leap between this literary figure in L1 and the image in Ls 2&3: “a violet pressed inside / when I was someone else.” The pressed violet—often associated with modesty, secrecy, or memory—suggests something delicate and preserved, yet removed from the vitality of lived experience. Like a flower flattened between pages, the speaker’s former self is intact but no longer alive in the present. The book becomes both a literal and symbolic container of memory.
This connection gains depth when considered alongside Huck’s journey. In the novel, Huck flees his abusive father and fakes his own death in order to seek freedom along the Mississippi River. Traveling with Jim, an enslaved man, he wrestles with what he calls a “deformed conscience,” torn between the values imposed by society and his own emerging sense of empathy and justice. This inner conflict produces a fractured identity, as Huck must decide who he is apart from what he has been taught to be.
Read through this lens, the pressed violet becomes a subtle analogue for these earlier selves—whether Huck’s or the speaker’s—preserved but outgrown. Just as Huck ultimately rejects the “civilizing” forces that seek to define him, the speaker recognizes a distance between their present identity and the person who once encountered this story. The haiku thus captures the bittersweet realization that revisiting a formative text is also a confrontation with one’s own past self, now fixed in memory like a flower between pages.
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