The adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Published 1884

I  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

Mark Twain's life greatly influenced his writing. His major works rely on material from his Hannibal, Missouri, boyhood and his careers as a Mississippi River pilot, a western miner, and a journalist.

 

Four years after his birth on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, Twain moved with his family to Hannibal, where his personality was shaped by experiences that would later be transformed into such works as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. When Twain was 11 his father died. Apprenticed as a printer, he began to contribute sketches to his brother's newspaper. As a young man he worked as a printer and a journalist in a number of cities, including New York, but returned to the Mississippi River in 1857 to fulfil a childhood dream of becoming a river pilot. He held this job until 1861 when river traffic was halted by the Civil War.

 

After serving very briefly with the Missouri militia, he travelled to the Nevada Territory with his brother Orion, who had been appointed secretary to the governor. In Nevada he worked as a journalist and as a prospector for silver and gold. By 1864 he had become a reporter in San Francisco, and in 1865 he published "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" in a New York newspaper. Reprinted widely, the story brought him his first taste of literary fame when it was reissued two years later. He delivered his first lecture in 1866, beginning a 40-year career in which his public image became as famous as his books.

 

As a California correspondent, he travelled to Hawaii, then known as the Sandwich Islands, and later to Europe, the Mediterranean, and Palestine. His 1867 foreign travels became the basis of his first book, Innocents Abroad (1869). While enjoying the popular success of his writing, Twain settled in the eastern United States. In 1870 he married Olivia Langdon, daughter of a wealthy merchant from Elmira, New York, and became editor and part-owner of a Buffalo newspaper. A year later, he moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where he spent a large portion of his increasing income on a spectacular mansion (now restored as a memorial) on Farmington Avenue.

 

Twain's prolific writing career stemmed partly from the financial demands of his expensive lifestyle. He turned to a variety of sources for his material: travel, his early life, and history. In 1872 he published Roughing It, a collection of irreverent sketches based on his travels and his western experiences. While The Gilded Age (1873), written with Charles Dudley Warner, tackled contemporary issues and provided a label for an era, Tom Sawyer made use of his Hannibal boyhood. A Tramp Abroad (1880) was another travel book, and The Prince and the Pauper, a historical comedy. Life on the Mississippi recounted the author's pilot days, and Huckleberry Finn, by most estimates his greatest work, was a sequel to Tom Sawyer.

 

By the time he produced his historical fantasy A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Twain had finished his most important work. The 1890s brought him great personal misfortune with financial collapse resulting from his unprofitable investment in a typesetting machine and the bankruptcy of the publishing company he had founded to distribute his works. In 1896, while he was making a worldwide lecture tour to pay off his debts, his daughter Susy died of meningitis in Hartford. Susy's death, like that of his first child and only son, Langdon, in 1872, devastated Twain, and the family never again resided in the Hartford house.

 

After Following the Equator (1897), another travel book, Twain worked on a variety of projects, many of which were published after his death. These works, most of which were overwhelmingly pessimistic, included The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900), What Is Man? (1906), and The Mysterious Stranger (1916). His final years were marked by increasing infirmity and unhappiness as he endured the deaths of his wife in 1904 and his daughter Jean in 1909. Towards the end of his life, Twain lived in New York, and he died at "Stormfield", his estate in Redding, Connecticut, on April 21, 1910.

 

At the time of his death, Twain had achieved international celebrity and was perhaps the most famous American of the time. Like many famous people, he created a public image that masked inner conflicts. A complex and brilliant man, he was more than a simple humorist; as a social critic, historian, philosopher, novelist, and popular entertainer, he continues to fascinate readers and biographers.

II  OVERVIEW

 

Huckleberry Finn, one of the most significant works of American literature and a worldwide bestseller, traces the moral education of a young boy whose better impulses overcome both self-interest and the negative forces around him. Huck, a homeless boy whose only relative is his disreputable father, is taken in by a respectable widow who seeks to educate him. She forces him to go to school, but Huck dislikes being "so cramped up and sivilized [sic] as they call it". His father abducts him and Huck prefers the freedom of his father's shack to the constraint of more genteel surroundings.

 

Freed from civilizing influences and placed in the company of his father, a vicious racist who boasts of his own illiteracy, Huck seems like a poor candidate for moral growth. But when Pap Finn nearly kills the boy during an alcoholic delirium, Huck escapes and meets the runaway slave Jim, who provides him with the opportunity to make a significant moral choice. Huck has been shaped not only by his father's view that one should act out of self-interest, but also by his society's belief that God's law mandates slavery. As he protects Jim, Huck feels certain that he will go to hell. Nonetheless, he transcends his upbringing and learns to value essential human bonds of trust beyond his own interest. Throughout the novel the boy witnesses a variety of human corruption, pretension, and violence, but maintains his integrity through his ability to identify with others.

 

Huckleberry Finn delivers its powerful message through Huck's narration. His rich language and humour remain fresh. Huck's journey down the river has become part of American mythology and the issues of freedom and responsibility he confronts still concern American culture. Readable, entertaining, and significant, the novel deserves its status as a "classic".

III  SETTING

 

A sequel to Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn takes place in the 1830s or 1840s. It begins in St Petersburg, a fictional town much like Hannibal, but its main action occurs on the Mississippi river. After Huck has met Jim on Jackson's Island, the two travel downriver on a raft that comes to symbolize their brotherhood and freedom. Hoping to drift to Cairo, Illinois, where Jim can escape to freedom, they are diverted by fog and travel southwards to Arkansas instead. The trip ties together a series of adventures which, as many commentators have remarked, contrast the peace and freedom of the raft with the violence, corruption, and constraint of the shore.

IV  THEMES AND CHARACTERS

 

Huckleberry Finn tells this story from his own point of view and in his own language. A boy of about 14, he has been left to his own devices since his mother's death. Huck's negligent father, Pap Finn, has an unnaturally pale complexion that results from his dissolute life but which also symbolizes white racism. Pap is an arrogant, selfish, ignorant, hypocritical drunk who is only interested in his son for the fortune of US$6,000 he has to his name. Pap abducts Huck from his guardian, the Widow Douglas, who imposes "sivilization" on him in the form of table manners, school, and church.

 

Although Huck enjoys the freedom of life with his father, his sympathy for others saves him from developing Pap's outlook and habits. Huck identifies with the plights of the lowly and reprehensible as well as with the kindly and virtuous. He assists Jim and the vulnerable Wilks sisters, but reasoning that he might one day become a murderer himself, he also tries to help murderers trapped on a derelict steamboat. He feels compassion during the brutal punishment of the King and the Duke, con men who have betrayed him.

 

Jim, a runaway slave, defines for Huck the nature of civilized conduct. Jim is first presented as the victim of a joke by Tom Sawyer and Huck, and later suffers a snakebite as the result of one of Huck's tricks. But when Huck attempts to deceive Jim, claiming that Jim's anxiety over Huck's being lost on the river was a dream, the slave asserts the basic rights of human dignity and solidarity. When Huck asks him to interpret the significance of debris on the raft, evidence that he has been duped, Jim says that Huck has betrayed friendship with a lie: "Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren's an makes 'em ashamed." Jim, who hopes one day to free his own family, becomes Huck's surrogate father and establishes for him a code of conduct that the boy encounters again with the Wilks sisters.

 

The King and the Duke, two scoundrels with a wide range of money-making schemes, collect money by faking religious conversion at camp meetings, staging bogus Shakespearean performances, pretending to be Louis XVII and the Duke of Bridgewater, selling Jim, and forcing Huck to participate in a scheme to defraud the Wilks sisters of their inheritance. However, when one of the sisters tries to catch Huck out in his lies, another sister stops her because he is "a stranger and so far from his people. How would you like to be treated so?" She says: "You oughtn't to say a thing to another person that will make them feel ashamed." The girl apologizes to Huck, confirming her hospitality towards outcasts and strangers. While Huck is compelled to lie in this case, he saves the girl's inheritance. Generally his lies serve to protect himself and others, contrasting with the more harmful untruths of his father, the King, the Duke, and Tom Sawyer.

 

Tom Sawyer functions as a foil: Huck's pragmatic intelligence is contrasted with Tom's absurd schemes drawn from books. Tom's ideas for rescuing Jim, accepted by Huck as superior wisdom, are a source of humour, but they denigrate Jim and lead to unnecessary danger. Tom's boyish fantasies are linked to the madness of a society governed by false chivalric codes of honour.

 

The Walter Scott, the derelict steamer named after the Scottish author of historical romances, suggests an attitude towards the ideals of chivalry as practised in the American South. These ideals are acted out as murderous fantasies by the Grangerfords, who impress Huck with their refinement and "culture" (plaster parrots and morbid art) but are involved in a bloody feud, and by Col. Sherburn, who shoots an unarmed man for insulting him. Society's institutions are built on some of the same illusions Tom draws from books, with terrible consequences. Religion is employed in the service of slavery and Huck has to overcome his "conscience" in order to act morally towards Jim.

V  LITERARY TECHNIQUE

 

Although it begins with the warning, "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot," Huckleberry Finn nevertheless contains all three elements. Major themes—freedom and responsibility, truth and falsehood, death and rebirth, and identity—support the action and provide structure.

 

The book's loose structure derives its unity from the narrative device of following a central character through a series of episodes, in the picaresque tradition. Like Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605), Huckleberry Finn tackles questions of illusion and reality by portraying Huck's contact with a number of levels of society. In addition, the novel's unity might be defined by Huck's education or initiation, his passage to maturity, experience, and insight.

 

Huck's narration performs a cohesive function within the novel and, as the reader is often in the position of knowing more than Huck, lends irony to the work. Twain was very aware of language, hence the richness of Huck's speech and the variety of dialects represented.

VI  TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

 

Throughout Huckleberry Finn a variety of lies are told. Discuss which seem to be useful and which harmful. Why?

 

How do the King and the Duke take advantage of society? Contrast them with Huck and Jim.

 

Death is everywhere in the book, from Huck's make-believe murder of himself, to his father's corpse in the floating house, the feud, Emmeline Grangerford's art, and the Wilks funeral. Does this make the book morbid? How does Huck handle his fear and understanding of death?

 

Huck tells a series of lies about his family. What do these reveal? How does he seek a sense of belonging?

 

At first Jim seems to be a simple character. In what ways does the author develop him?

 

How does Jim serve as a father figure to Huck? Contrast him with Pap Finn.

 

Pap Finn thinks only about himself and at the beginning of the book Huck seems self-interested too. How does Huck learn to consider others?

 

The Grangerfords are "civilized" but engage in meaningless slaughter. Twain uses Huck's impressions of them to convey social criticism. How?

VII  QUESTIONS

 

Compare the character of Tom Sawyer as it is developed in Tom Sawyer with its presentation in Huckleberry Finn. What are the differences? What accounts for them?

 

Write an essay on Twain's early life. What parts of his experience does he use in Huckleberry Finn?

 

Critics have defined the raft as a symbol of freedom. Write an essay on the symbolism of Huck's raft, tracing how its significance is developed.

 

Huckleberry Finn is a humorous book. Identify and discuss several different types of humour it employs.

VIII  RELATED TITLES AND ADAPTATIONS

 

The Huckleberry Finn character is first introduced in Tom Sawyer, where he plays a secondary role but is established as a homeless orphan with a reputation as a troublemaker. The story provides a highly enjoyable account of the imagination and abandon that characterize boyhood. The earlier book introduces Huck's relationship with Tom and explains his attainment of a US$6,000 estate.

 

The best-known film adaptation of Huckleberry Finn was released in 1939, directed by Richard Thorpe and starring Mickey Rooney, Walter Connolly, William Frawley, Rex Ingram, and Lynne Carver.

 

Source: Beacham’s Guide to Literature for Young Adults. Copyright by Gale Group, Inc. Reprinted by permission.
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