Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain

“Huck and Tom represent two viable models of the American Character. They exist side by side in every American and every American action. America is, and always has been, undecided about whether it will be the United States of Tom or the United States of Huck. The United States of Tom looks at misery and says: Hey, I didn’t do it. It looks at inequity and says: All my life I have busted my butt to get where I am, so don’t come crying to me. Tom likes kings, codified nobility, unquestioned privilege  Huck likes people, fair play, spreading the truck around. Whereas Tom knows, Huck wonders. Whereas Huck hopes, Tom presumes. Whereas Huck cares, Tom denies. These two parts of the American Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the nation, and come to think of it, these two parts of the World Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the world, and the hope of the nation and of the world is to embrace the Huck part and send the Tom part back up the river, where it belongs.”

—George Saunders, Introduction, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Modern Library Classics)

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn opens by familiarizing us with the events of the novel that preceded it, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Both novels are set in the town of St. Petersburg, Missouri, which lies on the banks of the Mississippi River. At the end of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, a poor boy with a drunken bum for a father, and his friend Tom Sawyer, a middle-class boy with an imagination too active for his own good, found a robber’s stash of gold. As a result of his adventure, Huck gained quite a bit of money, which the bank held for him in trust. Huck was adopted by the Widow Douglas, a kind but stifling woman who lives with her sister, the self-righteous Miss Watson.

As Huckleberry Finn opens, Huck is none too thrilled with his new life of cleanliness, manners, church, and school. However, he sticks it out at the bequest of Tom Sawyer, who tells him that in order to take part in Tom’s new “robbers’ gang,” Huck must stay “respectable.” All is well and good until Huck’s brutish, drunken father, Pap, reappears in town and demands Huck’s money. The local judge, Judge Thatcher, and the Widow try to get legal custody of Huck, but another well-intentioned new judge in town believes in the rights of Huck’s natural father and even takes the old drunk into his own home in an attempt to reform him. This effort fails miserably, and Pap soon returns to his old ways. He hangs around town for several months, harassing his son, who in the meantime has learned to read and to tolerate the Widow’s attempts to improve him. Finally, outraged when the Widow Douglas warns him to stay away from her house, Pap kidnaps Huck and holds him in a cabin across the river from St. Petersburg.

Whenever Pap goes out, he locks Huck in the cabin, and when he returns home drunk, he beats the boy. Tired of his confinement and fearing the beatings will worsen, Huck escapes from Pap by faking his own death, killing a pig and spreading its blood all over the cabin. Hiding on Jackson’s Island in the middle of the Mississippi River, Huck watches the townspeople search the river for his body. After a few days on the island, he encounters Jim, one of Miss Watson’s slaves. Jim has run away from Miss Watson after hearing her talk about selling him to a plantation down the river, where he would be treated horribly and separated from his wife and children. Huck and Jim team up, despite Huck’s uncertainty about the legality or morality of helping a runaway slave. While they camp out on the island, a great storm causes the Mississippi to flood. Huck and Jim spy a log raft and a house floating past the island. They capture the raft and loot the house, finding in it the body of a man who has been shot. Jim refuses to let Huck see the dead man’s face.

Although the island is blissful, Huck and Jim are forced to leave after Huck learns from a woman onshore that her husband has seen smoke coming from the island and believes that Jim is hiding out there. Huck also learns that a reward has been offered for Jim’s capture. Huck and Jim start downriver on the raft, intending to leave it at the mouth of the Ohio River and proceed up that river by steamboat to the free states, where slavery is prohibited. Several days’ travel takes them past St. Louis, and they have a close encounter with a gang of robbers on a wrecked steamboat. They manage to escape with the robbers’ loot.

During a night of thick fog, Huck and Jim miss the mouth of the Ohio and encounter a group of men looking for escaped slaves. Huck has a brief moral crisis about concealing stolen “property”—Jim, after all, belongs to Miss Watson—but then lies to the men and tells them that his father is on the raft suffering from smallpox. Terrified of the disease, the men give Huck money and hurry away. Unable to backtrack to the mouth of the Ohio, Huck and Jim continue downriver. The next night, a steamboat slams into their raft, and Huck and Jim are separated.

Huck ends up in the home of the kindly Grangerfords, a family of Southern aristocrats locked in a bitter and silly feud with a neighboring clan, the Shepherdsons. The elopement of a Grangerford daughter with a Shepherdson son leads to a gun battle in which many in the families are killed. While Huck is caught up in the feud, Jim shows up with the repaired raft. Huck hurries to Jim’s hiding place, and they take off down the river.

A few days later, Huck and Jim rescue a pair of men who are being pursued by armed bandits. The men, clearly con artists, claim to be a displaced English duke (the duke) and the long-lost heir to the French throne (the dauphin). Powerless to tell two white adults to leave, Huck and Jim continue down the river with the pair of “aristocrats.” The duke and the dauphin pull several scams in the small towns along the river. Coming into one town, they hear the story of a man, Peter Wilks, who has recently died and left much of his inheritance to his two brothers, who should be arriving from England any day. The duke and the dauphin enter the town pretending to be Wilks’s brothers. Wilks’s three nieces welcome the con men and quickly set about liquidating the estate. A few townspeople become skeptical, and Huck, who grows to admire the Wilks sisters, decides to thwart the scam. He steals the dead Peter Wilks’s gold from the duke and the dauphin but is forced to stash it in Wilks’s coffin. Huck then reveals all to the eldest Wilks sister, Mary Jane. Huck’s plan for exposing the duke and the dauphin is about to unfold when Wilks’s real brothers arrive from England. The angry townspeople hold both sets of Wilks claimants, and the duke and the dauphin just barely escape in the ensuing confusion. Fortunately for the sisters, the gold is found. Unfortunately for Huck and Jim, the duke and the dauphin make it back to the raft just as Huck and Jim are pushing off.

After a few more small scams, the duke and dauphin commit their worst crime yet: they sell Jim to a local farmer, telling him Jim is a runaway for whom a large reward is being offered. Huck finds out where Jim is being held and resolves to free him. At the house where Jim is a prisoner, a woman greets Huck excitedly and calls him “Tom.” As Huck quickly discovers, the people holding Jim are none other than Tom Sawyer’s aunt and uncle, Silas and Sally Phelps. The Phelpses mistake Huck for Tom, who is due to arrive for a visit, and Huck goes along with their mistake. He intercepts Tom between the Phelps house and the steamboat dock, and Tom pretends to be his own younger brother, Sid.

Tom hatches a wild plan to free Jim, adding all sorts of unnecessary obstacles even though Jim is only lightly secured. Huck is sure Tom’s plan will get them all killed, but he complies nonetheless. After a seeming eternity of pointless preparation, during which the boys ransack the Phelps’s house and make Aunt Sally miserable, they put the plan into action. Jim is freed, but a pursuer shoots Tom in the leg. Huck is forced to get a doctor, and Jim sacrifices his freedom to nurse Tom. All are returned to the Phelps’s house, where Jim ends up back in chains.

When Tom wakes the next morning, he reveals that Jim has actually been a free man all along, as Miss Watson, who made a provision in her will to free Jim, died two months earlier. Tom had planned the entire escape idea all as a game and had intended to pay Jim for his troubles. Tom’s Aunt Polly then shows up, identifying “Tom” and “Sid” as Huck and Tom. Jim tells Huck, who fears for his future—particularly that his father might reappear—that the body they found on the floating house off Jackson’s Island had been Pap’s. Aunt Sally then steps in and offers to adopt Huck, but Huck, who has had enough “sivilizing,” announces his plan to set out for the West.

Introduction by George Saunders
Commentary by Thomas Perry Sergeant, Bernard DeVoto, Clifton Fadiman, T. S. Eliot, and Leo Marx
 

“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” Ernest Hemingway wrote. “It’s the best book we've had.” A complex masterpiece that spawned controversy right from the start (it was banished from the Concord library shelves in 1885), it is at heart a compelling adventure story. Huck, in flight from his murderous father, and Jim, in flight from slavery, pilot their raft through treacherous waters, surviving a crash with a steamboat and betrayal by rogues. As Norman Mailer has said, “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.”

Reading Group Guide

1. Critics have long disagreed about exactly what role Jim plays in Huckleberry Finn. Some have claimed, for example, that his purpose is solely to provide Huck with the opportunity for moral growth, while others have argued that he is a surrogate father figure to Huck. What do you think is Jim's role in the novel?

2. The ending of Huckleberry Finn has been the source of endless critical controversy. Though no less than T.S. Eliot and Lionel Trilling defended the ending on the grounds that it is structurally coherent ("It is right," Eliot stated, "that the mood of the book should bring us back to the beginning"), many critics feel that the return of Tom Sawyer and his elaborate scheme for Jim's escape reduces what had been a serious quest for freedom to a silly farce. Bernard de Voto wrote, "In the whole reach of the English novel there is no more abrupt or more abrupt or chilling descent." How does the ending strike you?

3. The Mississippi can be considered a character in its own right in Huckleberry Finn. Discuss the role of the river in the novel.

4. How do humor and satire function in the book?

5. Critic William Manierre argued in a 1964-65 essay that "Huck's 'moral growth' has...been vastly overestimated," noting for example, that when his conscience begins to give him trouble, he decides he will "do whichever came handiest at the time," and that while Huck can be seen to achieve a kind of moral grandeur when he tears up the note he's written to Miss Watson, that achievement is undermined by his easy acceptance of Tom Sawyer's scheme in the last ten chapters. Do you agree or disagree?

6. In "The Greatness of Huckleberry Finn," Lionel Trilling stated that the style of the book is "not less than definitive in American literature," and Louis Budd has noted that "today it is standard academic wisdom that Twain's precedent-setting achievement is Huck's language." Discuss the effect of Twain's use of colloquial speech and dialect in the novel.

one of the great masterpieces of the world."

- H. L. Mencken

Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, led one of the most exciting of literary lives. Raised in the river town of Hannibal, Missouri, Twain had to leave school at age 12 and was successively a journeyman printer, a steamboat pilot, a halfhearted Confederate soldier, and a prospector, miner, and reporter in the western territories. His experiences furnished him with a wide knowledge of humanity, as well as with the perfect grasp of local customs and speech which manifests itself in his writing. 
With the publication in 1865 of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, Twain gained national attention as a frontier humorist, and the bestselling Innocents Abroad solidified his fame. But it wasn't until Life on the Mississippi (1883), and finally, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), that he was recognized by the literary establishment as one of the greatest writers America would ever produce. 

Toward the end of his life, plagued by personal tragedy and financial failure, Twain grew more and more pessimistic—an outlook not alleviated by his natural skepticism and sarcasm. Though his fame continued to widen—Yale & Oxford awarded him honorary degrees—Twain spent his last years in gloom and exasperation, writing fables about "the damned human race."

George Saunders (born December 2, 1958) is a New York Times bestselling American writer of short stories, essays, novellas and children's books. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's and GQ, among other publications. 

Saunders considered himself an Objectivist in his twenties but is now repulsed by the philosophy, comparing it to neoconservative thinking. From 1989 to 1996 he worked for Radian International, an environmental engineering firm in Rochester, New York, as a technical writer and geophysical engineer. He also worked for a time in Sumatra with an oil exploration crew. Since 1997, Saunders has been on the faculty of Syracuse University, teaching creative writing in the school's MFA program. 

 His most recent book, a collection of recent nonfiction titled The Braindead Megaphone, was published on September 4, 2007. While promoting The Braindead Megaphone, Saunders appeared on The Colbert Report and the Late Show with David Letterman.

He also contributed a weekly column,American Psyche, to the weekend magazine of The Guardian’s Saturday edition until October 2008.

In 2006, Saunders was awarded a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship. In the same year he was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Saunders resides in Syracuse, New York, is married and has two daughters. He was a Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University and Hope College in 2010 and participated in Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series and Hope's Visiting Writers Series.

NOTE TO TEACHERS

"The Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable." 

The first two sentences of Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi--written concurrently with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn--are a fitting introduction to Huck's book. They apply not only to the river that flows through Twain's great novel, shaping its form and action, but to the book itself and its main character. Both Huck and his wonderful book are "in all ways remarkable." 

This Comprehensive Edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn includes passages, episodes, and variations present in Twain's first handwritten manuscript--the first half of which was long lost but rediscovered in 1990. The chronology of Twain's composition of the book is, briefly, as follows. In 1876, while reading proofs of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, he began work on "another boy's book" and completed a first draft through Chapter XVI. He wrote five more chapters in 1879 and 1880, through the Grangerford-Shepherdson feud and the Sherburn-Boggs incident. Stymied once more, he laid the manuscript aside. In 1882, a long summer trip on the Mississippi resulted in renewed inspiration, and he completed the book over the next eighteen months. 

Included in this edition are thirty facsimile pages of Twain's rediscovered manuscript, as well as a 31-page "Textual Addendum," which discusses "some of the more exciting, amusing, significant, and thought-provoking variations now available..." Each item in the "Textual Addendum" is keyed to the appropriate facsimile manuscript page(s) for convenient reference. 

Today, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn stands as a central document--some would say the central document--of American literature and as an acclaimed classic of world literature. Its impact on American writers who came after Twain has been enormous. In his "Introduction," Justin Kaplan articulates the essential point: "By writing in Huck's voice and from Huck's point-of-view and raising the boy's first-person, semiliterate regional vernacular to an astonishing level of naturalness, descriptive power, and lyricism, Mark Twain not only revolutionized the art of American storytelling but also enlarged its social range." Perhaps V. S. Pritchett, the eminent British short-story writer and critic has put it most succinctly: "Huckleberry Finn takes the breath away." 

Ideally, your students will have completed some preparation before reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. That is to say, they will have acquired some understanding of the history and consequences of slavery in the United States, of the tradition of humor in American literature and journalism, and of the social realities of life on the American frontier. Such study and discussion are not necessary, but will facilitate a fuller understanding of this American classic. 

The most frequently attacked aspect of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is its wholesale use of the word,nigger. As Justin Kaplan points out, the word appears 215 times in the book. Its use in any but the most formal and serious of contexts is as objectionable today as it was unremarkable in the nineteenth century. The best approach here, we believe, is one of honesty and historical accuracy. In Huck's and Jim's society, the word was used by blacks and whites alike to identify anyone of African heritage (and frequently of any nonwhite heritage). As used by whites, it was a term of disparagement and degradation. As used by blacks, it was a term sometimes of identification, sometimes of contempt; as either, it carried the burden of degradation imposed by the white masters and rulers. The fact is, the word was used by everyone, white or black. Mark Twain would most likely scoff at today's politically correct euphemism ("the 'N' word") and prefer to confront head on the word itself, its accumulated meanings, and the social, economic, and personal realities from which it sprang and which it continues to reflect. 

As does every great novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn opens itself to a variety of approaches. Designed to guide your students through the richness of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the questions and topics that follow, organized in critical categories, are designed for a combination of approaches, including in-class discussion, individual study, and written or oral assignments. Suggested activities and research projects are included. Key themes in the novel--including the benefits and costs of individual freedom, the need for stable and nurturing family and social life, the values of caring and mutually respectful relationships, the charge to discern the truth behind surface appearances, the perception of the beauties, powers, and treasures of the natural world--will engage students in terms of their own lives and aspirations.



ABOUT THIS BOOK

Now, in this extraordinary literary uncovering, the original first half of Mark Twain's American masterpiece is available for the first time ever to a general readership. Lost for more than a century, the passages reinstated in this edition reveal a novel even more controversial than the version Twain published in 1885 and provide an invaluable insight into his creative process. A breakthrough of unparalleled impact, this comprehensive edition of an American classic is the final rebuttal in the tireless debate of "what Twain really meant."



DISCUSSION AND WRITING

Comprehension & Discussion Questions 

1. Why did Twain include the "Notice" on the opening page? 

2. Can the book's 43 chapters be grouped according to distinct action sequences? Are there correspondences among chapters or groups of chapters? 

3. Each stage of Huck's moral growth culminates in a crisis of conscience and a decision to assist Jim (as when Huck tells the two slave hunters that there is only one" man on the raft and that "He's white"); and each decision is more consequential than the previous. What are these stages and decisions; when do they occur; and what are their consequences? 

4. What are the consequences of Huck's and Jim's going past the mouth of the Ohio River in the fog? (Chapter XV) 

5. Among the novel's great ironies is that Huck's and Jim's quest for freedom takes them farther and farther into the deep South, the heart of slavery. How and why does this happen? What are the implications? 

6. The primary movement of Huck's and Jim's journey and of the novel is linear, from north to south. A back-and-forth pattern of movement between river and shore also occurs. How is this pattern important in terms of plot? How is it related to the north-to-south movement? Does it reflect any other kind of movement experienced by Huck or Jim? 

7. How do the king and the duke impact Huck's and Jim's life on the raft, their quest for freedom, and the novel's movement? 

8. What are the parallels between the king's and duke's treatment of Jim in Chapter XXIV and Tom Sawyer's treatment of him in the final chapters? 

9. The cemetery passage in Chapter XXIX is one of the few times when Huck is in immediate danger of actual harm or death. What are some similar incidents? What threatens his safety and well-being in each instance--other people or forces of nature? How does he escape in each instance? 

10. Do the final chapters, beginning with Huck's arrival at the Phelps farm, rely too much on coincidence? Do Tom Sawyer's elaborate escape stratagems indicate that Jim's and Huck's goals are unobtainable? 

Is there any justice in the fact that only Tom is wounded in the final chase through the swamp? 

The story is told by a fourteen-year-old Huck, who admits to elaborate lies and fabrications. Can we trust him? Can we accept his version of things, or must we read between his lines?



ABOUT THIS GUIDE
This teacher's guide was written by Hal Hager. Hal Hager, presently director of Hal Hager & Associates, taught American literature for ten years at the college level, including courses and seminars on the American novel and on Mark Twain. He received his bachelor's degree, summa cum laude, from Fordham University and his M.A. from New York University, where he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He has been active for more than twenty years in editing, marketing, reviewing, and writing about books. Immediately prior to establishing Hal Hager & Associates, he was Editorial Director at Baker & Taylor.

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/huckfinn/

http://www.randomhouse.com/book/181292/the-adventures-of-huckleberry-finn-by-mark-twain/