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.......To keep young Huckleberry Finn away from his drunken and abusive father, the Widow Douglas takes him into her home in St. Petersburg, Missouri. With the help of her prissy sister, Miss Watson, she attempts to civilize the mischievous boy, making him wash, attend church, read and write, and go to school. Huck, feeling like a starched white shirt, runs off to breathe free air but returns to join Tom Sawyer’s band of robbers, who meet in a secret cave and conduct mock battles. .......One day five years later, Pap Finn shows up to claim custody of his boy. But what he really wants is Huck’s money. On an earlier adventure (before the start of the novel) Huck and Tom Sawyer had found a robber’s cache of gold and other valuables. When everything was tallied up, Huck was worth the astounding sum of $6,000. .......The Widow Douglas and Judge Thatcher, an upstanding man who has been looking out for Huck’s welfare and finances, attempt to legalize the widow’s adoption of Huck. But another judge says the proper place for Huck is with his father. Months pass before Pap Finn makes his move. Drunk, he shows up at the Widow Douglas’s and seizes Huck, taking him to a cabin across the river, in Illinois. After  Pap
beats him, Huck escapes to Jackson Island
in the Mississippi. Nearby, he discovers another runaway, Miss Watson’s
slave, Jim, who fled after overhearing plans to sell him. After the river
rises, a house floats by and they climb aboard. Jim finds a dead man with
gunshot wounds. It turns out to be Pap Finn, Jim realizes, but he withholds
this information from Huck.
.......When searchers for Jim close in, Jim and Huck sail off on a raft, hoping to reach Cairo, Illinois, and take a steamship up the Ohio River and into the states that prohibit slavery. Along the way, the adventurers encounter robbers and slave-hunters. Huck, worried that he is morally obliged to turn Jim in, nevertheless decides to lie for him when the slave-hunters ask questions. .......After a thick fog descends on the river, Huck and Jim unknowingly pass Cairo. Worse, a steamboat runs into their raft, and Huck and Jim are separated for a while–going off on separate adventures–but are later reunited when they get caught in the middle of a feud between two families. On the raft, which Jim has repaired, they resume their journey. Along the way, they pick up two men being chased by armed robbers. One claims to be an English duke; the other, called “the king,” says he is the rightful dauphin of France–that is, the heir to the throne. They are both con artists, and Huck and Jim can’t get rid of them. .......In towns along the great river, the king and the duke work their swindles. In one town, they advertise a play called The King’s Cameleopard, or the Royal Nonesuch, saying it stars David Garrick the Younger and Edmund Kean the Elder. Because women and children are not allowed to attend, the men of the town think the play will be a real eye-opener, and they willingly pay the admission price of 50 cents. When the duke raises the curtain, says Huck, “The king come a-prancing out on all fours, naked; and he was painted all over, ring-streaked-and-striped, all sorts of colors, as splendid as a rainbow.” The crowd laughs. But when nothing else happens, the crowd becomes angry. However, too embarrassed to tell others about how they paid good money to see a naked man cross the stage, they go out and talk up the play. The duke and the king make hundreds before the people of the town wise up. .......In another scheme, the duke and king pretend to be brothers of the recently deceased Peter Wilks. Wilks bequeathed a fortune to his brothers, both Englishmen, who are expected to arrive in town and claim their money. When the duke and the king arrive and present themselves as the heirs, the nieces of Peter Wilks receive them and take the necessary steps to pass on the fortune. Feeling sorry for the Wilks sisters, Huck exposes the scheme. When the real heirs to the fortune show up, the duke and the king hightail it out of town and make it to the raft just as Huck and Jim are leaving. .......Downriver, the duke and the king sell Jim to Silas Phelps, a shoemaker whose wife happens to be Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Sally. Tom shows up, and he and Huck free Jim. Men chasing them shoot Tom in the leg. Jim is captured. Tom, bleeding profusely, tells Huck that Jim is actually a free man: His owner in St. Petersburg, Miss Watson, who has died, left a will with a provision that freed Jim. Tom receives treatment from a local doctor. .......In the end, all is well for Huck, Tom, and Jim. Jim informs Huck that he doesn’t have to worry about his cruel Pap anymore, because it was the corpse of his Pap that they found on the floating house when they left St. Petersburg. Tom has recovered from his bullet wound and keeps a pendant around his neck containing the infamous bullet. Huck says, “There ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it, and ain't a-going to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.”  Main Characters . Protagonist: Huckleberry Finn Antagonist: Society and Its Rules and Laws . .Huckleberry Finn Loyal, cheerful, fair-minded Missouri boy. Because his father abuses him, he runs away and teams with an escaped slave during many adventures on a raft ride down the Mississippi. Huck is the narrator of the novel. Jim The escaped slave who joins Huck. He is a simple, loyal, and trusting man whose common sense helps guide Huck. In a way, he serves as a surrogate father for Huck. Pap Finn Huck’s drunken, greedy, abusive father. His racism is symptomatic of the racism that infected society as a whole in 19th Century America. Widow Douglas Kindly but straitlaced woman who takes Huck into her home. Miss Watson The widow’s sister and owner of Jim. Tom Sawyer Huck’s friend. He likes to stage mock adventures of the kind he reads about in books. Judge Thatcher Judge who looks out for Huck’s welfare. The Duke and the King Con men who join Huck and Jim on the trip down the Mississippi. The Wilks Sisters Three nieces of a deceased man. When the Duke and the King make them pawns in a scheme to obtain the dead man’s bequest, Huck, feeling sorry for the sisters, exposes the scheme. Sally Phelps Tom Sawyer’s aunt. Silas Phelps Sally’s husband. Old Doctor Physician who treats Tom’s leg wound. Town Boys Members of Tom Sawyer’s gang. .. Setting . The action takes place in St. Petersburg, Missouri, and at various locations along the banks of the Mississippi River in Missouri, Arkansas, and Illinois. The time is the middle of the 19th Century, before the Civil War. . Type of Work . The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel that does not fit neatly into a single genre. However, it does contain elements of the apprenticeship novel, or bildungsroman, because it presents the experiences of a boy as he learns important values and lessons about life. It also contains elements of the picaresque novel in that it presents the episodic adventures (each a story in itself) of a person as he travels from place to place and meets a variety of other characters, some of them also travelers. The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn, written between 1876 and 1883, was published in 1884. By that time,
the U.S. Congress had amended the Constitution to abolish slavery (13th
Amendment, 1865), guarantee citizenship rights to every person born in
the U.S. (14th Amendment, 1868), and grant all citizens the right to vote
regardless of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude" (15th Amendment,
1870). However, beginning in 1877, some state legislatures
began passing segregation laws barring blacks from white schools, restaurants,
restrooms, cemeteries, theaters, parks, and other facilities. Consequently,
Twain's theme of racism in Huckleberry Finn remained current when
the book was published. It remains current today, even though segregation
laws have been struck down, because some whites still regard blacks as
inferior.
Huckleberry Finn tells the story in first-person point of view. His narration, including his accounts of conversations, contains regionalisms, grammatical errors, pronunciation errors, and other characteristics of the speech or writing of a 19th Century Missouri boy with limited education. Use of patois bolsters the verisimilitude of the novel. ... Theme 1 . All human beings are free, independent, and equal members of society. The novel celebrates the spirit of freedom and independence through Huck and Jim, escapees from oppression. . Theme 2 . The moral law supersedes government law. By protecting the black slave Jim, Huck breaks man-made law and feels guilty. But he refuses to turn Jim in because his moral instincts tell him he is doing the right thing. . Theme 3 . Wisdom comes from the heart, not the head. The educated characters in the novel are often deeply flawed in some way–self-righteous, prejudiced, quixotic, bound to tradition. However, the uneducated–namely, Huck and Jim–exhibit a natural, intuitive understanding of the world. Though ignorant in many ways, they are wise in the ways that count, relying on conscience, common sense, and compassion to guide them. . Theme 4 . A little child shall lead them. Twain probably did not have this Bible quotation (Isaiah: Chapter 11, Verses 6-9) in mind when he portrayed Huck as a boy who had a better grasp of morality than the often corrupt civilization around him–a boy worth imitating for his virtues. But the quotation aptly summarizes one of Twain’s themes nonetheless. . Theme 5 . The love of money is the root of all evil. This Bible quotation (First Epistle of Paul to Timothy: Chapter 6, Verse 10) also sums up a major theme in the novel. It is the love of money, Huck’s, that prompts Pap Finn to gain custody of Huck. It is the love of money that motivates the Duke and the King to work their scams. And, most important of all, it is the love of money that makes southerners retain the institution of slavery. . The climax occurs when Tom and Huck free Jim, and Tom–who has suffered a bullet wound in the leg–tells Huck that a provision in Miss Watson's will has freed Jim. . Structure and Style . Like the Mississippi River itself, the plot flows around bends, through darkness and fog, and into bright sunlight. The story is full of surprises, moving through many episodes that are little stories in themselves. These episodes form a unified whole that illumines the characters and their values. The mood is sometimes light and buoyant, sometimes deadly serious. The writing (that is, Huck’s storytelling and the characters’ conversations) is a delight–richly descriptive, humorous, and suspenseful. But it is not true, as some have observed, that Huck’s first-person narration and the conversation of the strange mixture of characters represent authentic regional dialects. And thank goodness for that. Were they truly authentic, the novel would be a tedious agglomeration of mispronunciations, backwoods neologisms, and weird grammar. Rather than bogging the novel down with language problems, Twain flavors the writing with just enough local patois to give it bite–but not so much that the novel becomes unpalatable. Twain learned to write this way from writers of "local color," an American literary movement of the last half of the 19th Century. Besides presenting narratives in a regional dialect, local-color writers, or "local colorists," attempted to portray life in the various sections of burgeoning America. However, rather than writing soberly realistic stories, they tended to write stories infused with "eccentrics as characters" and "whimsical plotting," according to William Flint Thrall and Addison Hibbard, authors of A Handbook to Literature (266). Thrall and Hibbard also note that local colorists "emphasized verisimilitude of detail without being concerned often enough about truth to the larger aspects of life or human nature" (266). One of the most famous of the local colorists was Bret Harte, who met and befriended Twain in San Francisco in the 1860's. Thrall, William Flint and Addison Hibbard. A Handbook to Literature. Revised and enlarged by C. Hugh Holman. New York: The .......Odyssey Press, 1960. Sources
Symbols
Since its publication in 1884, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been a target of censors in high schools, colleges, libraries, and religious institutions. One reason people have banned, or attempted to ban, the book is its characterization of Huckleberry Finn as a wayward child who defies his elders and society in general. Another reason, cited by some black Americans, is that the book seems to depict Jim as a negative stereotype that racists use to reinforce their prejudice. Particularly objectionable to many critics of the novel is the frequent use of the word nigger in Huckleberry Finn's narration. However, Twain's intent was to present a realistic portrait of a child seeking freedom from an abusive alcoholic father and from a society with overly rigid or fraudulent moral principles. His intent was also to expose the cruelty and injustice of racism, not to buttress it. The use of the word nigger–a deeply offensive corruption of the word Negro (the Spanish and Portuguese word for black person, derived from the Latin word niger, meaning black)–was part of Twain's effort to present realistically southern English as it was spoken or written, not as it should have been spoken or written. Author
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