Novel:
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
Plot Overview:
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.
CRITICISM:
Huckleberry Finn, like other classic works of the
imagination, can provide every reader with whatever he is capable of finding as
he reads. The well of the narrative runs as deep as the Mississippi River.
Twain delves into issues such as racism, friendship, war, religion, and freedom
with an uncanny combination of lightheartedness and gravitas.
As with most works of literature,
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn incorporates several themes developed around a
central plot create a story. In this case, the story is of a young boy, Huck,
and and escaped slave, Jim, and their moral, ethical, and human development
during an odyssey down the Mississippi River that brings them into many
conflicts with greater society. What Huck and Jim seek is freedom, and this
freedom is sharply contrasted with the existing civilization along the great
river. The practice of combining contrasting themes is common throughout Huck
Finn, and Twain uses the resulting contradictions for the purposes of humor and
insight. If freedom versus civilization is the overarching theme of the novel,
it is illustrated through several thematic contradictions, including Tom's
Romanticism versus Huck's Realism.
An
independent thought is good though. Twain encouraged the reader to realize that
conforming to other people is not a wise choice, that can have consequence. Do
not go with someone else’s ideas because they sound more righteous or glorious,
this is often not the case. Tom Sawyer who is the foil of Huck has complete
control of Huck. The two boys have vary different views, but Huck is submissive
to Tom. Tom convinces Huck into doing things that Huck sees as pointless. An
instance where Huck’s submissiveness is demonstrated is the decision on how to
free Jim. Huck knows that he will go with Tom‘s plan before he even hears it.
It is with the feud that the
novel begins to fail, because from here on the episodes is a mere distraction
to the true subject of the work: Huck’s affection for and responsibility to
Jim.” Huck cares little that Jim might be dead when the two are separated in
the fog. He doesn’t seem much affected when he discovers, at last, that Jim is
alive after all. And that’s not to mention the worst offence of all: Huck’s
behavior once he reunites with his old partner in crime, Tom Sawyer.
Huckleberry Finn’s reality may
not be what we want or what would make the book morally satisfying—but it is
all too easy to understand in human terms. In those last chapters, Twain wasn’t
taking any easy way out or wrapping up loose ends any which way he could. He was
showing us ourselves as we actually are—as we change from the private (river)
to the public (town) sphere, when of a sudden, others’ eyes are on us. And that
is not a pretty sight to behold.
Metaphor Analysis
Land: The land, in Huck Finn,
largely represents the bondage and cruelty of American civil society. To Jim,
the land means captivity in slavery. To Huck, the land comes to symbolize
bondage of thought and behavior exuded by the religious-minded Miss Watson and
the Widow Douglas.
Mississippi River/Raft:
Conversely, the Mississippi River symbolizes freedom, both for Jim and Huck. The pair can only find safety
and peace of mind on the river; whenever they step onto land, they find
themselves getting into trouble.
Twain's characters: Twain also
uses many of his main characters to represent certain characteristic qualities
of Americans. Huck, for example, is the typical American frontiersman: he's
shrewd, even manipulative at times, and above all, he's a realist. Tom, though
he possesses many of the same qualities, is less of a realist, but instead
tries to romanticize his world. Huck's pap has what Tocqueville describes as a
depraved love of equality. He symbolizes the corruption of humanity and the
depravity of those who live outside of civilization. Huck's pap is a perfect
contrast to the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson, who epitomize the civility of
religious women in America.
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