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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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Huckleberry Finn and Jim
Mark Twain

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 in 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.

Norman Mailer, likewise, had great praise saying, "The mark of how good Huckleberry Finn has to be is that one can compare it to a number of our best modern American novels and it stands up page for page." (NYTimes Books, 12 Dec 1984)

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, it immediately became controversial, and has remained so to this day (see "Controversy" below).

Plot summary

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Many white characters in the story are depicted as foolish, cruel or selfish, in contrast to the main black character, Jim, who is depicted as wise and unselfish, albeit uneducated and superstitious. The story is set well before the American Civil War, in the 1840s, the time frame of Tom Sawyer. Huck, as we know from Tom Sawyer, is a loose-living young vagabond with no mother and an alcoholic father. He meets Jim, a slave who is about to be sold down the river and separated from his wife and children, and they attempt to go down the Mississippi River and then up the Ohio to freedom. The book tells of their adventures together.

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 Huck and Tom had found in the previous book precipitates his flight, staging 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 drunk man 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 "King" 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 uncle'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.

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, believing that helping a slave escape will condemn him to Hell. He eventually decides that he will help Jim escape to freedom, even if it means Hell. In fact, 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 "King" 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.

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Controversy

Huckleberry Finn

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."[1]

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; 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 (215 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.

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."[1]

The actual name "Nigger Jim" does not appear in the book and is a misconception popularized by Twain's biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine.

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, is the single greatest sentence in American literature.

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