Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Totally Explained

Everything about Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn totally explained

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884 / 1885) (often shortened to Huck Finn) by Mark Twain is commonly accounted as one of the first Great American Novels. It is also one of the first major American novels ever written using Local Color Regionalism, or vernacular, told in the first person by the eponymous Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, best friend of Tom Sawyer and hero of three other Mark Twain books.
The book is noted for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River, and its sober and often scathing look at entrenched attitudes, particularly racism. 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.
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. 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.

Publication history

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'd 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 doesn't have the definite article "the" as a part of its proper title. Writer Sara Baker 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.
   Mark Twain composed the story in pen on notepaper between 1876 and 1883. The 665 pages of the original manuscript contain voluminous and lengthy changes and amendments that provide insights into Clemens's creative process. Paul Needham, who supervised the authentication of the manuscript for Sotheby's books and manuscripts department in New York in 1991, stated, "What you see is [Clemens's] attempt to move away from pure literary writing to dialect writing". For example, Clemens revised the opening line of Huck Finn three times. He initially wrote, "You won't know about me," which he changed to, "You don't know about me," before settling on the final version, "You don't know about me without you've read a book by the name of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'; but that ain't no matter." The revisions also show how Clemens reworked his material to strengthen the characters of Huck and Jim, as well as his sensitivity to the debate then current over literacy and voting.
   A later version was the first typewritten manuscript delivered to a printer.

Plot summary

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it'll be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it'll be shot.

Life in St. Petersburg

The story begins in fictional St. Petersburg, Missouri, on the Mississippi River. Two young boys, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, have each come into a considerable sum of money as a result of their earlier adventures (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer). Huck has been placed under the guardianship of the Widow Douglas, who, together with her sister, Miss Watson, are attempting to "sivilize" him (sic). Huck appreciates their efforts, but finds civilized life confining. In the beginning of the story, Tom Sawyer appears briefly, helping Huck escape at night from the house, past Miss Watson's slave, Jim. They meet up with Tom Sawyer's self-proclaimed gang who plot to carry out adventurous crimes.
Huck's life is changed by the sudden appearance of his shiftless father, "Pap", an abusive parent and drunkard. Although Huck is successful in preventing his Pap from acquiring his fortune, Pap forcibly gains custody of Huck and the two move to the backwoods where Huck is kept locked inside his father's cabin. Equally dissatisfied with uncivilized life, Huck escapes from the cabin, elaborately fakes his own death, and sets off down the Mississippi River.

The Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons

While living quite comfortably in the wilderness along the Mississippi, Huck happily encounters Miss Watson's slave Jim on an island, and Huck learns that he's also run away. The two team up and shortly after missing their destination, Cairo, Illinois (in a free state to which Jim has planned to escape), Huck and Jim's raft is swamped by a passing steamship, separating the two. Huck is given shelter by the Grangerfords, a prosperous local family. He becomes friends with 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.
The vendetta comes to a head when Buck's sister, Sophia Grangerford, elopes with Harney Shepherdson. In the resulting conflict, all of the remaining Grangerford males are shot and killed, and upon seeing Buck's corpse, Huck is too devastated to write about everything that happened. However, Huck does describe how he narrowly avoids his own death in the gunfight, later reuniting with Jim and the raft and together fleeing farther south on the Mississippi River.

The Duke and the King

Further down the river, Jim and Huck rescue two cunning grifters, who join Huck and Jim on the raft. The younger of the two swindlers, a man of about thirty, introduces himself as a son of an English duke and his father's rightful successor. The older one, about seventy, then trumps the duke's claim by alleging that he's actually the "Lost Dauphin", the son of Louis XVI and rightful King of France. The "Duke" and the "King" then force Jim and Huck to allow them to travel on the raft, committing a series of confidence schemes on the way south.
As these schemes unfold, Huck sees the attempted lynching of a southern gentleman, Colonel Sherburn, after Sherburn kills a harmless town drunk. Sherburn faces down the lynch mob with a loaded rifle and forces them to back down after an extended speech regarding what he believes to be the essential cowardice of "Southern justice," the lynch mob. (This vignette, which stands out as disconnected from the remaining plot, is thought to represent Twain's own contradictory and misanthropic impulses — Huck, the outcast, essentially flees from Southern society, while Sherburn, the gentleman, confronts it, albeit in a brutally, destructive fashion.)
The Duke and the King's schemes reach their climax when the two grifters impersonate the brothers of Peter Wilks, a recently deceased man of property. Using an absurd English accent, the King manages to convince most of the townspeople that he and the Duke are Wilks's brothers recently arrived from England, and proceeds to liquidate Wilks's estate. Huck is upset at the men's plan to steal the inheritance from Wilks's daughters and actual brothers, as well as their actions in selling Wilks's slaves and separating their families. To thwart their plans, Huck steals the money the two have acquired and hides it in Wilks's coffin. Shortly thereafter, the two con men are exposed when two other men claiming to be the Wilks's true brothers arrive. However, when the money is found in Wilks's coffin, the Duke and the King are able to escape in the confusion, rejoining Huck and Jim on the raft.

Jim's escape

After the four fugitives flee farther south on their raft, the King "captures" Jim and sells his interest in any reward while Huck is away in a nearby town. Outraged by this betrayal, Huck rejects the advice of his "conscience," which continues to tell him that in helping Jim escape to freedom, he's stealing Miss Watson's property. Telling himself "All right, then, I'll go to hell!", Huck resolves to free Jim.
   Huck discovers, upon arriving at the house in which Jim is being held, that the King has sold his supposed interest in the slave Jim for forty dollars to Silas Phelps, Tom Sawyer's uncle. In a parallel to the con men's earlier scheme with the Wilks family, Silas's wife, Aunt Sally, mistakes Huck for Tom himself, and Huck plays along, hoping to find a way to free Jim. Shortly after, Tom himself arrives for a visit, and agrees to join Huck's scheme, pretending to be his own half-brother, Sid Sawyer.
   Jim reveals the secret of the Royal Nonesuch before the two rogues are able to set their confidence game into motion. That night the Duke and King are captured by the townspeople, and are tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail.
   Rather than simply sneaking Jim out of the shed where he's being held, Tom develops an elaborate plan to free him, involving secret messages, hidden tunnels, a rope ladder sent in Jim's food, and other elements from popular novels, including a note to the Phelps warning them of an Indian tribe stealing their runaway slave. Huck and Jim go along with the plan, but Tom is shot in the leg during the resulting pursuit. Rather than complete his escape, Jim insists that Huck return to town and find a doctor to treat Tom. This is the first time that Jim demands something from a white person; Huck explains this by saying "I knowed he was white on the inside...so it was all right now." Jim and Tom are then captured and brought back by the doctor.

Conclusion

After Jim's recapture, events quickly resolve themselves. Tom's Aunt Polly arrives and reveals Huck's and Tom's true identities. Tom announces that Jim has been free for months: Miss Watson died two months earlier and freed Jim in her will, but Tom chose not to reveal Jim's freedom so he could come up with an elaborate plan to rescue Jim. Jim tells Huck that Huck's father has been dead for some time and that Huck may return safely to St. Petersburg. (Jim discovered this when he and Huck were on Jackson Island and came upon part of a house drifting down stream. The dead body in the house, which Jim didn't let Huck see, was Huck's father.) In the final narrative, Huck announces that he's quite glad to be done writing his story, and despite Tom's family's plans to adopt and "sivilize" him (sic), Huck intends to flee west to Indian Territory.

Major Themes

In the tradition of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Twain wrote a novel that embodies the search for freedom. Twain wrote during the post-Civil War period when there was an intense white reaction against blacks. Twain took aim squarely against racial prejudice, increasing segregation, lynchings, and the generally accepted belief that blacks were sub-human. He "made it clear that Jim was good, deeply loving, human, and anxious for freedom."
Throughout the story, Huck is in moral conflict with the received values of the society in which he lives, and while he's unable to consciously refute those values even in his thoughts, he makes a moral choice based on his own valuation of Jim's friendship and human worth, a decision in direct opposition to the things he's been taught. Mark Twain in his lecture notes proposes that "a sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience," and goes on to describe the novel as "...a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat."

Reception

Now known as an American classic, Huck Finn's publication resulted in generally friendly reviews, but was controversial from the outset. Upon issue of the American edition in 1885 a number of libraries banned it from their stacks. One noted incident was recounted in the newspaper, the Boston Transcript —

The Concord (Mass.) Public Library committee has decided to exclude Mark Twain's latest book from the library. One member of the committee says that, while he doesn't wish to call it immoral, he thinks it contains but little humor, and that of a very coarse type. He regards it as the veriest trash. The library and the other members of the committee entertain similar views. characterizing it as rough, coarse, and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people. Hemingway declared "All modern American literature comes from" Huck Finn, and hailed it as "the best book we've had." He cautioned, however, "If you must read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end." Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Powers states in his Twain biography (Mark Twain: A Life) that "Huckleberry Finn endures as a consensus masterpiece despite these final chapters" in which Tom Sawyer leads Huck through elaborate machinations to rescue Jim. The epithetic phrase "Nigger Jim" doesn't 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, and Russell Baker, who 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."
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.
Adaptations

Film

Huck Finn, a 1937 film produced by Paramount
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a 1939 film starring Mickey Rooney
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a 1954 film starring Thomas Mitchell and John Carradine produced by CBS (see: http://www.movierevie.ws/movies/890030/The-Adventures-of-Huckleberry-Finn.html)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a 1960 film directed by Michael Curtiz, starring Eddie Hodges and Archie Moore
The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a 1968 animated television series for children
Hopelessly Lost, a 1972 Soviet film
Huckleberry Finn, a 1974 musical film
Huckleberry Finn, a 1975 ABC movie of the week with Ron Howard as Huck Finn.musical film
Huckleberry Finn, a 1976 Japanese anime with 26 episodes
Huckleberry Finn and His Friends, a 1979 television series starring Ian Tracey
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'', a 1985 television movie.
The Adventures of Huck Finn, a 1993 film starring Elijah Wood and Courtney B. Vance
Huckleberry Finn Monogatari a 1994 Japanese anime with 26 episodes

See also: Film adaptations as listed in the Internet Movie Database
Stage

Big River, a 1985 Broadway musical with lyrics and music by Roger Miller
Literature

(2007), a novel about Huck's father, Pap Finn, by Jon Clinch.
My Jim (2005), a novel narrated largely by Sadie, Jim's enslaved wife by Nancy Rawles.Further Information
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