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..

– Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Synopsis:

Based in the mid 1800s before the Civil War, the novel chronicles the journey of and relationship between Huckleberry Finn and a runaway southern slave, Jim, as they flee south on the Mississippi River. The pair have a journey that bring them together and that shows Mark Twain’s dislike for slavery in the southern culture.

Development:

Twain initially conceived of the work as a companion to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that would follow Huck Finn through adulthood. Beginning with a chapter he had deleted from the earlier novel, Twain began work on a manuscript he originally titled Huckleberry Finn’s Autobiography. Twain worked on the manuscript off and on for the next several years, ultimately abandoning his original plan of following Huck’s development into adulthood. He appeared to have lost interest in the manuscript while it was in progress, and set it aside for several years. After making a trip down the Mississippi, Twain returned to his work on the novel. Upon completion, the novel’s title closely paralleled its predecessor’s: “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade)”.

Unlike The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn does not have the definite article “the” as a part of its proper title. Writer Philip Young has hypothesized that this absence represents the fundamentally uncompleted nature of Huck’s adventures — while Tom’s adventures were completed (at least at the time) at the end of his novel, Huck’s narrative ends with his stated intention to head West.

Quotes from Huck:

“Pray for me! I reckoned if she knowed me she’d take a job that was more nearer her size. But I bet she done it, just the same–she was just that kind. She had the grit to pray for Judus if she took the notion–there warn’t no back-down to her, I judge.”

“I hain’t ever seen her since that time that I see her go out of that door; no, I hain’t ever seen her since, but I reckon I’ve thought of her a many and a many a million times, and of her saying she would pray for me; and if ever I’d a thought it would do any good for me to pray for HER, blamed if I wouldn’t a done it or bust.”

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain is commonly accounted as one of the first Great American Novels. It was also one of the first major American novels ever written using Local Color Realism or 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.

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 Huckleberry Finn 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.

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, the book immediately became controversial, and has remained so to this day

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 ***** to gain his freedom. This has been called exaggerated by some critics, but there is nothing truer in the book.

The epithetic phrase “****** Jim” does not appear in the novel but was used by Albert Bigelow Paine in his monumental 1912 Twain biography and by later U.S. critics including Leslie Fiedler, Norman Mailer [5], and Russell Baker, who famously 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 ‘****** Jim,’ as Twain called him to emphasize the irony of a society in which the only true gentleman was held beneath contempt.[6]

Ralph Ellison was impressed with how clearly Twain allowed Jim’s “dignity and human capacity” to emerge in the novel. According to Ellison,

Huckleberry Finn knew, as Mark Twain, that Jim was not only a slave but a human being [and] a symbol of humanity . . . and in freeing Jim, Huck makes a bid to free himself of the conventionalized evil [i.e., slavery] taken for civilization by the town.[7]

Bill Walsh wrote:

Huck Finn was (and probably will remain) a lesson in the use of language, of epithets, of slurs and how they can change (or not) over time.

HARDTRUCK: Remember “Sybil”, starring Sally Field? I am not so cute as her, but I’m about that crazy. Everyone who knows me says they like me, but I think they may be afraid to indicate otherwise.

I don’t wonder so much about you–I think I have you figured out, having read a few of your answers since your contact request. Sorry, nothing personal, but I just don’t have time for contacts. I already have too many people whose lives I must constantly direct, and am not looking to enlist more. But thanks for asking.

I trying to imagine you with a personality.