Huckleberry Finn
Huckleberry Finn: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or as it is known in more recent editions, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is a novel by American author Mark Twain, which was first published in the United Kingdom in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885. Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written throughout in vernacular English, characterized by local color regionalism. It is told in the first person by Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, the narrator of two other Twain novels (Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective) and a friend of Tom Sawyer. It is a direct sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The book is noted for "changing the course of children's literature" in America for the "deeply felt portrayal of boyhood".It is also known for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River. Set in a Southern antebellum society that had ceased to exist over 20 years before the work was published, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an often scathing satire on entrenched attitudes, particularly racism. Perennially popular with readers, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has also been the continued object of study by literary critics since its publication. The book was widely criticized upon release because of its extensive use of coarse language. Throughout the 20th century, and despite arguments that the protagonist and the tenor of the book are anti-racist, criticism of the bo
ok continued due to both its perceived use of racial stereotypes and its frequent use of the racial slur "nigger".
The story begins in fictional St. Petersburg, Missouri
(based on the actual town of Hannibal, Missouri), on the shore of
the Mississippi River "forty to fifty years ago" (the novel
having been published in 1884). Huckleberry "Huck" Finn (the protagonist and first-person
narrator) and his friend, Thomas "Tom" Sawyer, have each come into a
considerable sum of money as a result of their earlier adventures (detailed
in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer). Huck explains how he is placed under
the guardianship of the Widow Douglas, who, together with her
stringent sister, Miss Watson, are attempting to "sivilize" him and
teach him religion. Huck finds civilized life confining. His spirits are raised
when Tom Sawyer helps him to slip past Miss Watson's slave, Jim, so he can
meet up with Tom's gang of self-proclaimed "robbers". Just as the
gang's activities begin to bore Huck, his shiftless father, "Pap", an
abusive alcoholic, suddenly reappears. Huck, who knows his father will
spend the money on alcohol, is successful at keeping his fortune out of his
father's hands. Pap, however, kidnaps Huck and takes him out of town.
In Illinois,
Jackson's Island and while going Downriver
Pap forcibly moves Huck to an abandoned cabin in the woods along the Illinois shoreline. To evade further violence and escape imprisonment, Huck elaborately fakes his own murder, steals his father's provisions, and sets off downriver in a 13/14-foot long canoe he finds drifting downstream. Soon, he settles comfortably on Jackson's Island, where he reunites with Jim, Miss Watson's slave. Jim has also run away after he overheard Miss Watson planning to sell him "down the river" to presumably more brutal owners. Jim plans to make his way to the town of Cairo in Illinois, a free state, so that he can later buy the rest of his enslaved family's freedom. At first, Huck is conflicted about the sin and crime of supporting a runaway slave, but as the two talk in-depth and bond over their mutually held superstitions, Huck emotionally connects with Jim, who increasingly becomes Huck's close friend and guardian. After heavy flooding on the river, the two find a raft (which they keep) as well as an entire house floating on the river (Chapter 9: "The House of Death Floats By"). Entering the house to seek loot, Jim finds the naked body of a dead man lying on the floor, shot in the back. He prevents Huck from viewing the corpse.
In Kentucky: the
Grangerfords and Shepherdsons
Traveling onward, Huck and Jim's raft is struck by a passing
steamship, again separating the two. Huck is given shelter on the Kentucky side
of the river by the Grangerfords, an "aristocratic" family. He
befriends Buck Grangerford, a boy about his age, and learns that the
Grangerfords are engaged in a 30-year blood feud against another
family, the Shepherdsons. Although Huck asks Buck why the feud started in the
first place, he is told no-one knows anymore. The Grangerfords and Shepherdsons
go to the same church, which ironically preaches brotherly love. The vendetta
finally comes to a head when Buck's older sister elopes with a member
of the Shepherdson clan. In the resulting conflict, all the Grangerford males
from this branch of the family are shot and killed by the remaining
Shepherdsons — including Buck, whose horrific murder Huck witnesses. He is
immensely relieved to be reunited with Jim, who has since recovered and
repaired the raft.
In Arkansas: the Duke
and the King
Near the Arkansas-Missouri-Tennessee border, Jim and Huck
take two on-the-run grifters aboard the raft. The younger man, who is
about thirty, introduces himself as the long-lost son of an English duke (the Duke
of Bridgewater). The older one, about seventy, then trumps this outrageous
claim by alleging that he himself is the Lost Dauphin, the son of Louis
XVI and rightful King of France. The "duke" and "king"
soon become permanent passengers on Jim and Huck's raft, committing a series
of confidence schemes upon unsuspecting locals all along their
journey. To divert public suspicion from Jim, they pretend he is a runaway
slave who has been recaptured, but later paint him blue and call him the
"Sick Arab" so that he can move about the raft without bindings.
On one occasion, the swindlers advertise a three-night
engagement of a play called "The Royal Nonesuch". The play turns out
to be only a couple of minutes' worth of an absurd, bawdy sham. On the
afternoon of the first performance, a drunk called Boggs is shot dead by a
gentleman named Colonel Sherburn; a lynch mob forms to retaliate against
Sherburn; and Sherburn, surrounded at his home, disperses the mob by making a
defiant speech describing how true lynching should be done. By the third night
of "The Royal Nonesuch", the townspeople prepare for their revenge on
the duke and king for their money-making scam, but the two cleverly skip town
together with Huck and Jim just before the performance begins.
In the next town, the two swindlers then impersonate
brothers of Peter Wilks, a recently deceased man of property. To match accounts
of Wilks's brothers, the king attempts an English accent and the duke
pretends to be a deaf-mute while starting to collect Wilks's
inheritance. Huck decides that Wilks's three orphaned nieces, who treat Huck
with kindness, do not deserve to be cheated thus and so he tries to retrieve
for them the stolen inheritance. In a desperate moment, Huck is forced to hide
the money in Wilks's coffin, which is abruptly buried the next morning. The
arrival of two new men who seem to be the real brothers throws everything into
confusion, so that the townspeople decide to dig up the coffin in order to
determine which are the true brothers, but, with everyone else distracted, Huck
leaves for the raft, hoping to never see the duke and king again. Suddenly,
though, the two villains return, much to Huck's despair. When Huck is finally
able to get away a second time, he finds to his horror that the swindlers have
sold Jim away to a family that intends to return him to his proper owner for
the reward. Defying his conscience and accepting the negative religious
consequences he expects for his actions—"All right, then, I'll go to
hell!"—Huck resolves to free Jim once and for all.
On the Phelpses' farm
Huck learns that Jim is being held at the plantation
of Silas and Sally Phelps. The family's nephew, Tom, is expected for a
visit at the same time as Huck's arrival, so Huck is mistaken for Tom and
welcomed into their home. He plays along, hoping to find Jim's location and
free him; in a surprising plot twist, it is revealed that the expected
nephew is, in fact, Tom Sawyer. When Huck intercepts the real Tom Sawyer on the
road and tells him everything, Tom decides to join Huck's scheme, pretending to
be his own younger half-brother, Sid, while Huck continues pretending to
be Tom. In the meantime, Jim has told the family about the two grifters and the
new plan for "The Royal Nonesuch", and so the townspeople capture the
duke and king, who are then tarred and feathered and ridden out
of town on a rail.
Rather than simply sneaking Jim out of the shed where he is being held, Tom develops an elaborate plan to free him, involving secret messages, a hidden tunnel, snakes in a shed, a rope ladder sent in Jim's food, and other elements from adventure books he has read, including an anonymous note to the Phelps warning them of the whole scheme. During the actual escape and resulting pursuit, Tom is shot in the leg, while Jim remains by his side, risking recapture rather than completing his escape alone. Although a local doctor admires Jim's decency, he has Jim arrested in his sleep and returned to the Phelps. After this, events quickly resolve themselves. Tom's Aunt Polly arrives and reveals Huck and Tom's true identities to the Phelps family. Jim is revealed to be a free man: Miss Watson died two months earlier and freed Jim in her will, but Tom (who already knew this) chose not to reveal this information to Huck so that he could come up with an artful rescue plan for Jim. Jim tells Huck that Huck's father (Pap Finn) has been dead for some time (he was the dead man they found earlier in the floating house), and so Huck may now return safely to St. Petersburg. Huck declares that he is quite glad to be done writing his story, and despite Sally's plans to adopt and civilize him, he intends to flee west to Indian Territory.
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