Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) is commonly accounted as one of the first Great American Novels. It was also one of the first major American novels ever written using Local Color Realism or the vernacular, or common speech, being told in the first person by the eponymous Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, best friend of Tom Sawyer (hero of three other Mark Twain books). The book was first published in 1884.
 On the Raft | |
| Author | Mark Twain |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | E. W. Kemble |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Adventure Humour |
| Publisher | Charles L. Webster And Company |
Publication date | 1884 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 366 pp |
| ISBN | NA {{isbn}}: Check isbn value: invalid character (help) |
| Preceded by | The Adventures of Tom Sawyer |
| Followed by | Tom Sawyer Abroad |
The book is noted for its innocent young protagonist, its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River, and its sober and often scathing look at entrenched attitudes, particularly racism, of the time. The drifting journey of Huck and his friend Jim, a runaway slave, down the Mississippi River on their raft may be one of the most enduring images of escape and freedom in all of American literature.
Although the book has been popular with young readers since its publication, and taken as a sequel to the comparatively innocuous The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (which had no particular social message), it has also been the continued object of study by serious literary critics. Although the Southern society it satirized was already a quarter-century in the past by the time of publication, the book immediately became controversial, and has remained so to this day (see "Controversy" below).
In January 2007, Time magazine placed the book fifth in their list of The 10 Greatest Books of All Time.[1]
Plot introduction
Based in the mid 1800s before the Civil War, the novel chronicles the adventures of and relationship between Huckleberry Finn and the runaway slave Jim, as they flee south on the Mississippi River. During that journey, the pair have a series of adventures that bring them closer together and expose them to the flaws in Southern culture.
Explanation of the novel's title
Twain initially conceived of the work as a companion to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that would follow Huck Finn through adulthood. Beginning with a chapter he had deleted from the earlier novel, Twain began work on a manuscript he originally titled Huckleberry Finn's Autobiography. Twain worked on the manuscript off and on for the next several years, ultimately abandoning his original plan of following Huck's development into adulthood. Upon completion, the novel's title closely paralleled its predecessor's: "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade)" [2]
Unlike The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn does not have the definite article "the" as a part of its proper title. Writer Philip Young has hypothesized that this absence represents the fundamentally uncompleted nature of Huck's adventures -- while Tom's adventures were completed (at least at the time) at the end of his novel, Huck's narrative ends with his stated intention to head West.[3]
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn opens by familiarizing us with the events of the novel that preceded it, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Both novels are set in the town of St. Petersburg, Missouri, which lies on the banks of the Mississippi River. At the end of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, a poor boy with a drunken bum for a father, and his friend Tom Sawyer, a middle-class boy with an imagination too active for his own good, found a robber’s stash of gold. As a result of his adventure, Huck gained quite a bit of money, which the bank held for him in trust. Huck was adopted by the Widow Douglas, a kind but stifling woman who lives with her sister, the self-righteous Miss Watson. As Huckleberry Finn opens, Huck is none too thrilled with his new life of cleanliness, manners, church, and school. However, he sticks it out at the bequest of Tom Sawyer, who tells him that in order to take part in Tom’s new “robbers’ gang,” Huck must stay “respectable.” All is well and good until Huck’s brutish, drunken father, Pap, reappears in town and demands Huck’s money. The local judge, Judge Thatcher, and the Widow try to get legal custody of Huck, but another well-intentioned new judge in town believes in the rights of Huck’s natural father and even takes the old drunk into his own home in an attempt to reform him. This effort fails miserably, and Pap soon returns to his old ways. He hangs around town for several months, harassing his son, who in the meantime has learned to read and to tolerate the Widow’s attempts to improve him. Finally, outraged when the Widow Douglas warns him to stay away from her house, Pap kidnaps Huck and holds him in a cabin across the river from St. Petersburg. Whenever Pap goes out, he locks Huck in the cabin, and when he returns home drunk, he beats the boy. Tired of his confinement and fearing the beatings will worsen, Huck escapes from Pap by faking his own death, killing a pig and spreading its blood all over the cabin. Hiding on Jackson’s Island in the middle of the Mississippi River, Huck watches the townspeople search the river for his body. After a few days on the island, he encounters Jim, one of Miss Watson’s slaves. Jim has run away from Miss Watson after hearing her talk about selling him to a plantation down the river, where he would be treated horribly and separated from his wife and children. Huck and Jim team up, despite Huck’s uncertainty about the legality or morality of helping a runaway slave. While they camp out on the island, a great storm causes the Mississippi to flood. Huck and Jim spy a log raft and a house floating past the island. They capture the raft and loot the house, finding in it the body of a man who has been shot. Jim refuses to let Huck see the dead man’s face. Although the island is blissful, Huck and Jim are forced to leave after Huck learns from a woman onshore that her husband has seen smoke coming from the island and believes that Jim is hiding out there. Huck also learns that a reward has been offered for Jim’s capture. Huck and Jim start downriver on the raft, intending to leave it at the mouth of the Ohio River and proceed up that river by steamboat to the free states, where slavery is prohibited. Several days’ travel takes them past St. Louis, and they have a close encounter with a gang of robbers on a wrecked steamboat. They manage to escape with the robbers’ loot. During a night of thick fog, Huck and Jim miss the mouth of the Ohio and encounter a group of men looking for escaped slaves. Huck has a brief moral crisis about concealing stolen “property”—Jim, after all, belongs to Miss Watson—but then lies to the men and tells them that his father is on the raft suffering from smallpox. Terrified of the disease, the men give Huck money and hurry away. Unable to backtrack to the mouth of the Ohio, Huck and Jim continue downriver. The next night, a steamboat slams into their raft, and Huck and Jim are separated. Huck ends up in the home of the kindly Grangerfords, a family of Southern aristocrats locked in a bitter and silly feud with a neighboring clan, the Shepherdsons. The elopement of a Grangerford daughter with a Shepherdson son leads to a gun battle in which many in the families are killed. While Huck is caught up in the feud, Jim shows up with the repaired raft. Huck hurries to Jim’s hiding place, and they take off down the river. A few days later, Huck and Jim rescue a pair of men who are being pursued by armed bandits. The men, clearly con artists, claim to be a displaced English duke (the duke) and the long-lost heir to the French throne (the dauphin). Powerless to tell two white adults to leave, Huck and Jim continue down the river with the pair of “aristocrats.” The duke and the dauphin pull several scams in the small towns along the river. Coming into one town, they hear the story of a man, Peter Wilks, who has recently died and left much of his inheritance to his two brothers, who should be arriving from England any day. The duke and the dauphin enter the town pretending to be Wilks’s brothers. Wilks’s three nieces welcome the con men and quickly set about liquidating the estate. A few townspeople become skeptical, and Huck, who grows to admire the Wilks sisters, decides to thwart the scam. He steals the dead Peter Wilks’s gold from the duke and the dauphin but is forced to stash it in Wilks’s coffin. Huck then reveals all to the eldest Wilks sister, Mary Jane. Huck’s plan for exposing the duke and the dauphin is about to unfold when Wilks’s real brothers arrive from England. The angry townspeople hold both sets of Wilks claimants, and the duke and the dauphin just barely escape in the ensuing confusion. Fortunately for the sisters, the gold is found. Unfortunately for Huck and Jim, the duke and the dauphin make it back to the raft just as Huck and Jim are pushing off. After a few more small scams, the duke and dauphin commit their worst crime yet: they sell Jim to a local farmer, telling him Jim is a runaway for whom a large reward is being offered. Huck finds out where Jim is being held and resolves to free him. At the house where Jim is a prisoner, a woman greets Huck excitedly and calls him “Tom.” As Huck quickly discovers, the people holding Jim are none other than Tom Sawyer’s aunt and uncle, Silas and Sally Phelps. The Phelpses mistake Huck for Tom, who is due to arrive for a visit, and Huck goes along with their mistake. He intercepts Tom between the Phelps house and the steamboat dock, and Tom pretends to be his own younger brother, Sid. Tom hatches a wild plan to free Jim, adding all sorts of unnecessary obstacles even though Jim is only lightly secured. Huck is sure Tom’s plan will get them all killed, but he complies nonetheless. After a seeming eternity of pointless preparation, during which the boys ransack the Phelps’s house and make Aunt Sally miserable, they put the plan into action. Jim is freed, but a pursuer shoots Tom in the leg. Huck is forced to get a doctor, and Jim sacrifices his freedom to nurse Tom. All are returned to the Phelps’s house, where Jim ends up back in chains. When Tom wakes the next morning, he reveals that Jim has actually been a free man all along, as Miss Watson, who made a provision in her will to free Jim, died two months earlier. Tom had planned the entire escape idea all as a game and had intended to pay Jim for his troubles. Tom’s Aunt Polly then shows up, identifying “Tom” and “Sid” as Huck and Tom. Jim tells Huck, who fears for his future—particularly that his father might reappear—that the body they found on the floating house off Jackson’s Island had been Pap’s. Aunt Sally then steps in and offers to adopt Huck, but Huck, who has had enough “sivilizing,” announces his plan to set out for the West.
Major themes
Family is one of the most important themes in the book. The attempt by Huck's father to gain custody of him in order to steal the money that Huck and Tom had found in the previous book precipitates his flight, Huck stages his own murder to get away. One of the major plot devices in the book is Jim's hiding the death of Huck's father from him. As they travel the river, Huck is frequently involved with families who attempt to adopt him.
Another theme is the life on the Mississippi River, alternately idyllic and threatening. In true picaresque fashion, Huck and Jim encounter all the varieties of humanity as they travel: murderers, thieves, confidence men, good people and hypocrites.
In the middle of the story, Mark Twain comments on the irrationality of pride and honor, as Huck sees brutal, cold-blooded murders committed by two feuding families. Later on, a Southern aristocrat coldly kills a drunken man who has been yelling empty threats at him, and the village turns the incident into a sort of circus, ignoring the dead man's daughter while trying to start a lynch mob, which quickly disintegrates after being mocked by the murderer himself. The "Dauphin" and the "Duke", two seemingly-innocuous (in some ways) confidence men are infamous characters of the novel who attempt to con three orphaned girls out of their late father's life savings. Towards the end of the book, they are tarred and feathered, and carried out of town on a rail, symbolizing how equally or more evil a village of people can be, given the magnitude of the response relative to that of the suspected crime.
Much of the section detailing the feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons can be interpreted as an attack on exaggerated or melodramatic romanticism. The poem "Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots" by Emmeline Grangerford, two-thirds of which details what Stephen Dowling Bots did not die of, is an example. The whole Grangerford parlor was filled with kitsch. Also, Emmeline Gragerford's paintings, which had titles that all ended in "Alas", were also a parody of this. Emmeline Grangerford was modeled after Julia A. Moore, a notoriously bad poet known as "The Sweet Singer of Michigan".
It is commonly said that the beginning and ending of the book, the parts in which Tom Sawyer appears as a character, detract from its overall impact. Others feel Tom serves to start the story off and to bring it to a conclusion, and that Tom's ridiculous schemes have the paradoxical effect of providing a framework of 'reality' around the mythical river voyage. Much of the boyhood innocence and romantic depictions of nature occur in the first sixteen chapters and the last five, while the middle of the story shows the harsh realities of antebellum society.
Another theme is Huck's gradual acceptance of Jim as a man, strong, brave, generous, and wise (though realistically portrayed as imperfect).
Its themes on religion are almost as strong as its race theme. Huck himself comes across as religious but having trouble believing in God: although he tries to pray, he finds it to be a waste of time. Later in the book, he encounters the dilemma of whether or not to steal Jim out of slavery; he is forced to reckon with the fact that, according to his society, helping a slave escape will condemn him to Hell. His famous quote "All right, then, I'll GO to hell", is a direct attack by Twain on the religious support of slavery in the U.S. Huck comes across as one of the most unbiased, open-minded characters of popular literature as he continually questions his own motivation and life in general throughout the book. While he may not be pious, he does have a strong sense of right and wrong and often acts out of moral conviction.
In another amusing commentary on 19th century society, Twain includes the "Dauphin" character, a deluded, unemployed drunkard who insists upon being addressed as "Your Majesty" and claims to be the "Lost Dauphin", the long-lost son of Louis XVI and Queen Marie-Antoinette, who were both executed by French republicans in 1793. Their son, Louis XVII, actually died in a republican jail in 1795, but many pretenders appeared all over the world claiming to have been the young boy-king of France. By the middle of the century their claims were becoming increasingly absurd and unbelievable.
Controversy
Although the Concord, Massachusetts library banned the book immediately after its publication because of its "tawdry subject manner" and "the coarse, ignorant language in which it was narrated", the San Francisco Chronicle came quickly to its defense on March 29 1885:
- "Running all through the book is the sharpest satire on the ante-bellum estimate of the slave. Huckleberry Finn, the son of a worthless, drunken, poor white man, is troubled with many qualms of conscience because of the part he is taking in helping the negro to gain his freedom. This has been called exaggerated by some critics, but there is nothing truer in the book."
In the United States, occasional efforts have been made to restrict the reading of the book. In addition to its Concord ban, it has, at various times, also been:
- excluded from the juvenile sections of the Brooklyn Public library and other libraries
- removed from reading lists due to alleged racism (e.g., in March of 1995 it was removed from the reading list of 10th grade English classes at National Cathedral School in Washington, DC, according to the Washington Post; and a New Haven, Connecticut correspondent to Banned Books Online reports it has been removed from a public school program there as well)
- removed from school programs at the behest of groups maintaining that its frequent use of the word nigger (212 times overall) implies that the book as a whole is racist, despite what defenders maintain is the overwhelmingly anti-racist plot of the book, its satirical nature, and the anachronism of applying current definitions of polite speech to past times.
- removed from public and school libraries because of it's "racist" plot.
Russell Baker wrote:
- "The people whom Huck and Jim encounter on the Mississippi are drunkards, murderers, bullies, swindlers, lynches, thieves, liars, frauds, child abusers, numbskulls, hypocrites, windbags and traders in human flesh. All are white. The one man of honor in this phantasmagoria is 'Nigger Jim,' as Twain called him to emphasize the irony of a society in which the only true gentleman was held beneath contempt."[4]
Ralph Ellison was impressed with how clearly Twain allowed Jim's "dignity and human capacity" to emerge in the novel. According to Ellison,
- "Huckleberry Finn knew, as did Mark Twain, that Jim was not only a slave but a human being [and] a symbol of humanity . . . and in freeing Jim, Huck makes a bid to free himself of the conventionalized evil [i.e., slavery] taken for civilization by the town." [5]
Albert Bigelow Paine's 1912 Twain biography marks the first use of the term "Nigger Jim," a phrase not attributed to Clemens, causing its rise in usage in short-hand descriptions of the character in critical essays.
The American Library Association ranked Huckleberry Finn the fifth most frequently challenged (in the sense of attempting to ban) book in the United States during the 1990s.
A character in the 1969 Nero Wolfe novel Death of a Dude by Rex Stout opines that "All right, then, I'll go to hell," Huck's pronouncement on his own fate for his decision to help Jim escape, cited above, is the single greatest sentence in American literature.
Annotated Edition
Michael Patrick Hearn has annotated The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Film adaptations of the novel
- Huck Finn, a 1937 film produced by Paramount
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a 1939 film starring Mickey Rooney
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a 1960 film directed by Michael Curtiz, starring Eddie Hodges
- The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a 1968 animated television series for children
- Huckleberry Finn, a 1974 musical film
- Huckleberry Finn, a 1976 Japanese anime with 26 episodes.
- Big River, a 1985 Broadway musical with lyrics and music by Roger Miller.
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a 1985 television movie.
- The Adventures of Huck Finn, a 1993 film starring Elijah Wood and Courtney B. Vance
- See also: Film adaptations as listed in the Internet Movie Database
Stage adaptations
References
- ^ http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1578073,00.html
- ^ Twain, Mark (2001-10-01). "Introduction". The Annotated Huckleberry Finn. introduction and annotations by Michael Patrick Hearn. W. W. Norton & Company. pp. xiv–xvii, xxix. ISBN 0-393-02039-8.
- ^ Young, Philip (1966-12-01). Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration. Penn State Press. p. 212. ISBN 0-271-02092-X.
- ^ "Expelling Huck Finn". jewishworldreview.com. Retrieved Jan 8.
{{cite web}}: Check date values in:|accessdate=(help); Unknown parameter|accessyear=ignored (|access-date=suggested) (help) - ^ "Is Huck Finn a Racist Book?". salwen.com. Retrieved Jan 8.
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External links
- Mark Twain Room (Houses original manuscript of Huckleberry Finn)
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at Project Gutenberg
- Summary of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - wiki of chapter summaries, characters, study topics.
- Is Huck Finn Racist?
- GradeSaver study guide including analysis, background and quizzes
- Huckleberry Finn, page by page text
- Teacher's Guide at Random House
- Audio book recording with accompanying text of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Culture Shock: Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Born To Trouble: Adventures of Huck Finn
- SearchLIT.org's hand-picked collection of associated links for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Free typeset PDF ebook of Huck Finn and other Twain books optimized for printing, plus extensive Twain reading list
- Say It Ain’t So, Huck: Second thoughts on Mark Twain’s “masterpiece,” by Jane Smiley, Harper’s Magazine, Jan96, Vol. 292, Issue 1748, p61, abridged [1]
- Film adaptations as listed in the Internet Movie Database