Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Overview

Three hundred pages, forty-three chapters, published in Britain in 1884 and in America in February 1885, and narrated throughout by a boy of about thirteen who cannot spell and has no idea that he is telling a serious story. That last fact is the technical achievement. Everything the reader understands has to arrive through a narrator who does not understand it, which means the book’s judgements are never stated and always unmistakable.

Twain took seven or eight years over it and abandoned it twice. He wrote the early chapters in 1876, stopped around the point where a steamboat runs down the raft, put the manuscript aside for years, made a trip back to the Mississippi that produced Life on the Mississippi, and then finished the novel in a rush. The break is visible, and some critics think the book never recovers its direction after it.

Two prefatory jokes set the tone. A notice warns that anyone looking for a motive, a moral or a plot will be prosecuted, banished or shot. An explanatory note claims that the seven dialects in the book were done with care rather than at random, which is both a joke and true.

A word about the language. The novel uses a racial slur well over two hundred times, in the mouths of everyone including Huck. It is not incidental and cannot be edited out without changing what the book is doing, since the whole method depends on a narrator who has absorbed his society’s vocabulary completely and its moral arithmetic not quite. That is an explanation, not a settlement; the objection is serious and has been made by serious people for a century.

What happens

Huck is living with the Widow Douglas, being civilised, which he finds tolerable and dull. His father comes back for the money Huck found in the previous book, takes him across the river and locks him in a cabin, and beats him. Huck escapes by butchering a pig, scattering the blood, and leaving a trail that suggests he was murdered.

On Jackson’s Island he finds Jim, who belongs to the Widow’s sister Miss Watson and has run because he overheard her considering selling him to a New Orleans trader for eight hundred dollars. They take a raft and head downriver, intending to reach the Ohio at Cairo and go up it into the free states. In the fog they pass it without knowing, and every mile after that is the wrong direction.

The middle of the book is a series of shore excursions, each of which is a look at some piece of American life. The Grangerfords, a courteous and cultured family, have been killing and being killed by the Shepherdsons for so long that nobody remembers why, and the episode ends with a boy Huck’s age dead in the river. Colonel Sherburn shoots an unarmed drunk in the street and then stands on his roof and tells the lynch mob exactly what cowards they are, and they go home. Two confidence men come aboard, style themselves a duke and a dauphin, and run a series of frauds, culminating in an attempt to steal the inheritance of three orphaned girls by impersonating their English uncles.

Between these, the raft. In chapter 15 Huck plays a trick, pretending the fog and the separation never happened, and Jim’s response, that he had grieved and that a friend who does that to a friend is trash, makes Huck apologise to a Black man, which takes him fifteen minutes to bring himself to do. In chapter 16 he nearly turns Jim in and cannot. And in chapter 31, after the King sells Jim for forty dollars, Huck writes the letter that will restore him to Miss Watson, feels clean for a moment, thinks about the raft, and tears it up with the line that is the summit of the book.

Then he arrives at the Phelps farm, is mistaken for Tom Sawyer, and the real Tom turns up and agrees to help steal Jim out of the shed he is locked in. What follows is thirty or forty pages in which Tom, who has read too many adventure novels, insists on a rescue with rope ladders, anonymous letters, a grindstone, snakes and spiders, when the door could simply be opened. Jim goes along with it. Tom is shot in the leg, and it is revealed that Miss Watson died two months ago and freed Jim in her will, which Tom knew the whole time. Huck, offered adoption and civilisation again, decides to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest.

How to read it

Read it for the voice, and read some of it aloud. The book is funny on almost every page, and its jokes are the argument: Huck reports absurdities deadpan, and the reader supplies the judgement he cannot.

Read chapters 15, 16 and 31 with particular attention. They are the moral spine, and they are separated by long stretches of comedy so that the turns land without being announced.

Notice what is on the shore and what is on the river. Twain alternates deliberately, and the pattern is unbroken: on the raft, two people; on land, feuds, frauds, mobs and slavery. The river is not freedom, though, since it is carrying them the wrong way.

Be ready to argue about the ending. Hemingway told readers to stop at the point where Jim is stolen and called the rest cheating. Leo Marx’s 1953 essay, written against Trilling and Eliot, argues that the evasion chapters betray everything the book has built, reducing Jim to a plaything after he has been a man. Others read those chapters as the bleakest satire in the novel: a free man is kept in a shed for weeks to satisfy a boy’s reading, and every white character, Huck included, lets it happen. Decide which you think, and notice that the fact of the disagreement is itself a fact about the book.

And read it alongside Frederick Douglass, or any first-person account by someone who was actually enslaved. Jim is a white writer’s creation, drawn in part from a minstrel tradition, and what the novel can and cannot show about him is clearer with something else beside it.

Questions it raises

• Huck decides to go to hell rather than return Jim. Is that a moral triumph if he never stops believing he is doing wrong?
• The book was written twenty years after emancipation and set forty years before it. What is it actually about, 1845 or 1885?
• Is Jim a fully drawn character, a figure in a tradition of comic stereotype, or both at once in different chapters?
• Does the raft represent freedom when it is carrying a runaway deeper into slave country the entire time?
• Are the last chapters a failure of nerve, or the harshest satire in the novel?
• Huck lights out for the Territory to avoid being civilised. Is that an escape from anything, given what the Territory was about to become?