The Heart of Harte

Harte could be said to search a man’s heart. For in “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” he explores in depth the aspects of the heart buried beneath the layers of human developments and professional hierarchies. Rather than letting you catch glimpses of human motive within a complex characterization played out an in elaborate plot, he rather structures his story to highlight struggles in a human heart. Thus a person is removed from their every day interaction and habits, their life, and given an extraordinary task to see what there heart is truly made of. Almost like a Native American boy being sent out on some test to have his manhood proven, here the socially unacceptable are torn out or sent out to test the humanity of there very hearts. Thus the wicked gambler, prostitutes, and town drunk are cast out to see what mettle they are made of. When they come to the test not all of them made it, proved there humanity, which is what is interesting to me. Uncle Billy sees his chance to flee and takes the mules and runs. Now this is especially interesting because it shows in one way that Harte is not trying to make an explicate moral argument. For when it comes to stories like this I think that it is important to separate out the moral from the literary. For if one is always trying to make a moral conclusion of a story, especially a sentimental story, one becomes very lost. For this is like trying to decide if it is a moral wrong to eat meat based on the health studies by scientists. Now it might indeed be bad for your health to eat meat at such and such a rate per week but this doesn’t tell you whither or not it is bad to eat meat. In the same sense I think that Harte is not trying to give us a moral lesson on the goodness of prostitution. He seems to be asking us to sympathize with our common humanity, which will then reveal more of our self and others to our eyes. From this then we can then make our moral judgments, just as the man looking at the science of meat can afterwards make a fuller moral judgment based on his customs, addiction tendencies, and religious leanings. Uncle Billy, to get back to it, is important because in his betrayal of everyone Harte is showing us that there are still men who do not follow or are stubborn at heart. He is not trying to blatantly attack the system of criminal punishment by creating sympathy in you for everyone, but is trying to appeal to our hearts in order that he may deepen our understanding; I think. Mr. Oakhurst, whose modern equivalent might be a bad boy rapper, is shown to be weak not simply hateful. The improper man turned out to be the one troubled the deepest by his comrades sufferings, the “weakest of the outcasts of Poker Flats”.