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CHAPTE In the opening paragraph, Huck introduces himself to us as the narrator of the story. He talks to us in a relaxed, matter-of-fact tone that makes him sound friendly, honest, and maybe a little less respectful than he should be. He does, after all, come close to calling Mark Twain a liar. Try to imagine Twain writing that paragraph, in which he has a fictional character accuse him of stretching the truth in an earlier book.
Twain seems to be sharing a joke with you, the reader, but Huck isnt in on the joke. Huck doesnt say it to be funny. He says it innocently, not realizing that it could be taken as an insult. Keep this trick of Twain's in mind as you read the book, because youll find him doing it dozens of times.
Hell be expecting you to understand things better than Huck, whos just a simple, almost illiterate kid. Twain will often be winking at you over Huck's head, the way two grownups might be quietly amused at the naive things said by a young child. Huck tells us that hes been living with the Widow Douglas, a woman he seems to like even though she has set out to sivilize him. His friend, Tom Sawyer, has persuaded him to go along with her, and Huck finds himself living in a house, wearing clean clothes, and eating meals on schedule- activities that seem very unnatural to him.
Although hes able to put up with the widow, her sister, Miss Watson, is another story. He describes her as a slim old maid, with goggles on, and he complains about her trying to teach him spelling and manners. When she tells him about heaven and hell, he figures hell must be a better place, since Miss Watson assures him that she is going to heaven. After an unpleasant session with Miss Watson, Huck goes up to his room and stares out the window. The night sounds of the woods make him sad, until one sound begins to stand out- he recognizes it as a signal from Tom Sawyer. Huck sneaks out of the house, feeling better now that he and his friend are off on an adventure.
CHAPTE As Huck and Tom begin sneaking past the house in the dark, they make enough noise to attract the attention of Jim, Miss Watsons black slave. He comes out of the kitchen to see what caused the noise, sits down in the dark to wait for it to happen again, and falls asleep. Tom slips into the kitchen to steal some candles for their adventure, and when he comes back, Huck is anxious to get going. But Tom insists on playing a prank on Jim before they leave. Huck knows this is a dumb idea, because if Jim wakes up, theyll be in deep trouble for sneaking out of the house after dark. But dumb or not, Tom gets to do what he wants.
As the self-appointed leader of the gang, Tom manages to get his own way just about all the time. So he lifts Jims hat from his head and hangs it on a nearby limb. Huck tells us that Jim later turned this incident into an elaborate tale of being visited by witches while he slept. Huck and Tom get together with the rest of the gang, and they all travel downriver to a cave Tom has picked out as a meeting place.
Huck reports what happens at the meeting, making no comment on it. At the meeting, Tom outlines his plan for forming a gang of bloodthirsty robbers. He talks of the blood oath theyll take together. He says that anyone who reveals the gangs secrets will be killed, along with his whole family. He describes what will be done with the body of such a traitor. Where does Tom get such ideas?
He gets them from the adventure books he reads. Unfortunately, he doesnt always understand what hes reading, as youll be able to tell later from his explanation of what it means to ransom someone. Read this whole scene very carefully, and youll get a good picture of what Tom is- a kid whos smarter than most of the others, but not nearly as smart as he thinks he is. Tom does read more than the others, he does have a quick mind and a lively imagination. But hes the leader of this group more because of his forceful personality than any real difference between him and the others.
If you wanted to be very critical of Tom, you could call him two things- a phony and a bully. But Huck doesnt say anything along these lines. He doesnt see how ridiculous Toms statements are. He works from the assumption that Tom is much smarter than he is and he takes Toms statements at face value.
As was true in the first chapter, Twain doesnt expect you to be that naive. He expects you to see the truth about Tom, even if the young narrator misses it. CHAPTE The morning after the secret meeting, Huck has to put up with a scolding from Miss Watson and- worse- looks of hurt disappointment from the Widow Douglas. Miss Watson tells him he might get better if he prays, but he has his doubts about that. Huck then tells us about a time when he went off into the woods and had a long think about praying. (Hes in the habit of going off by himself and thinking when something bothers him. ) If prayer is so powerful, he wonders, why dont people like the Deacon, Widow Douglas, and Miss Watson have everything they want?
The widow explains to him that praying will win him spiritual gifts, and that the best kind of prayer is the kind thats meant to help other people. Huck goes off and thinks about that for a while, then decides that he isnt interested in something that will help other people but not him. Huck also talks about the difference between the Providence (God) that the widow tells him about, and the one he hears about from Miss Watson. Huck thinks they are two different Gods, and this is another case of Twain talking to you over the head of his narrator. Twain is suggesting that God can be imagined in different ways by people with different personalities. Huck says hed prefer belonging to the widows God, but he cant see why God would want someone so ignorant, low-down, and ornery.
By this time you should begin to see that Twain doesnt share Huck's low opinion of himself- and he doesnt expect you to share it either. Huck believes that just about everyone he comes in contact with is better than he is. For example, as much as he dislikes Miss Watson, he doesnt immediately dismiss everything she tells him. He may reject it after hes thought it over a bit, but his first reaction is, Shes smarter than I am.
Maybe shes right. He even goes along with everything Tom Sawyer suggests, no matter how silly the suggestion is. Tom reads books and goes to school. Tom is sivilized, so he must be better than Huck. At this point, Huck talks a bit about his father, who disappeared more than a year ago. Pap was a drunkard who used to beat Huck whenever he was sober.
Huck certainly doesnt miss him. He tells us that a body was found floating in the river, and that some people believe it was Pap. Huck doesnt think so, and hes afraid his father will show up again. Huck isnt very excited about playing robber with Toms gang. They do a lot of running around, he tells us, and they scare people sometimes, but they arent stealing anything.
And they certainly havent killed anybody yet. In Toms imagination, though, they are doing all the things he said they would. They have swords and guns, they steal jewels and gold ingots, theyre getting ready to ambush a whole parcel of Spanish merchants and rich Arabs. Huck knows theyre really brandishing broomsticks and stealing turnips but Toms description of the Spaniards and A-rab's, with their elephants and camels, does catch his interest.
So he shows up the next day to take part in the spectacle. What Huck sees is a Sunday School picnic for little kids. What Tom sees are the Spaniards and Arabs he described. The gang has been enchanted by magicians, Tom explains, and they only think theyre looking at a kids picnic. Read this conversation between Huck and Tom carefully, because it shows a contrast between the two boys- a contrast that will become important later in the book. In this conversation, Huck makes several suggestions about how they can carry out their plan to rob and kill.
Tom counters all of Huck's suggestions with fantasy elements from the books hes read- magicians, magic lamps, giant genies. Huck is thinking about the concrete world around him; Tom is following a set of rules hes put together from his books. The two boys are not talking about the same thing. Tom becomes exasperated with Huck's realistic, down-to-earth approach to robbing and killing, and finally calls him a perfect saphead for not knowing anything. Huck, of course, doesnt claim that he isnt a saphead, because he secretly believes he is.
Instead of arguing, he goes off to test what Tom has said. He tries conjuring up a giant by rubbing a tin lamp. When nothing happens, he puts Tom into the same class as the widow and Miss Watson. Tom might believe that the stuff he reads about is true, but to Huck, it has all the marks of a Sunday school. CHAPTE In the first three chapters Twain established the personality of his main character. In this chapter he begins to develop the plot- a series of adventures involving Huck.
Each of these adventures is almost a story in itself, even though most of them go on for several chapters. So from here on it would probably be better to read the book in sections instead of one chapter at a time. Ill still summarize the novel chapter by chapter, but Ill let you know when a new section begins and how many chapters it involves. You should read Chapters 4 - 7 as a unit, since they all deal with Pap, Huck's alcoholic father. Huck begins Chapter 4 by telling us he has actually adjusted to civilized life. The first paragraph suggests that he doesnt know as much arithmetic as he thinks he does, but he doesnt take no stock in mathematics, anyway.
He isnt deliriously happy with school, and living in a house, and all the rest of it, but he doesnt hate it the way he used to. Then one morning he knocks over the salt shaker at the breakfast table. As we saw near the end of Chapter 1, Huck is very superstitious and gets himself quite worked up over signs of bad luck. Hes certain the spilled salt means something terrible.
Sure enough, when he goes outside, he sees boot prints in the snow, and he recognizes them as belonging to his father. What he instantly does might seem puzzling at first, but we get an explanation soon enough. He runs to Judge Thatcher, who is the trustee of the money Huck got for helping to catch a gang of robbers. (That. adventure is mentioned in the second paragraph of the novel. ) He begs the judge to take the $ 6000 and the interest, so he wont have to tell no lies. The judge doesnt really understand Huck's motives, but he buys the account from the boy for one dollar. Huck knows that his father is going to be after the money, and his father has beaten him in the past for less reason than $ 6000.
He wants to be able to say he has no money- and he wants it to be the truth. This shows us something interesting about Huck's character. Pap is not one of the people he respects. Hes already told us he hopes never to see him again.
He expects the man to beat him and to try to steal his money. Yet, hes unwilling to tell a lie, even in such a desperate situation. Remember, this is the boy who has told us how low-down and ornery he must be in the eyes of God. After Huck gets rid of his money, he goes to visit Jim, Miss Watsons slave. Jim has a hair-ball that is supposed to have come from the stomach of an ox, and they both believe it has magical powers. Huck asks Jim to use the hair-ball to predict what Pap is planning to do.
Jim goes through a long, singsong speech, in which he predicts so many things that he actually predicts nothing. He gets so carried away that he predicts things that will happen to Huck many years in the future. Huck then goes up to his room and finds Pap waiting there for him NOTE: This is Jims second appearance in the story, and very soon he will become a major character. This is as good a time as any to deal with the kind of person he is and with Twain's use of the word nigger.
In recent years, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has often been the subject of debate and has even been banned in some schools and public libraries. The argument and the censorship revolve around the character of Jim. Jim is illiterate, superstitious, childlike, easily led, and apparently not very bright. Some people think the book could lead readers- especially young readers- to conclude that this is what all black people are like. The same people may be offended by Huck's use of the word nigger to refer to Jim.
To us in the 20 th century, nigger is an ugly word that many people would like to see erased from the language. On the other side of the argument are people who point out that the novel is set in a southern state in the middle of the last century. In that setting, these people say, the word nigger had no special meaning, good or bad. It was simply a regional pronunciation of negro. These same people would say that, in the same setting, a character like Jim was much more typical than he would be today. Whichever side of this argument you take, try to keep two things in mind.
First, a novel can be good or bad regardless of how much it reflects your own view of the world. And second, as weve already seen, theres often a big difference between what Huck says and what Mark Twain believes. CHAPTE Huck's meeting with his father turns out not to be as bad as he had feared. Once he gets over the initial shock, Huck finds that he isnt scared of Pap at all. Instead of the terrifying creature he grew up with, Huck sees a pitiful old man who has worn his body down to a sickly mess. What Pap sees is an uppity kid who has forgotten his place in society.
He rails at the boy for wearing clean clothes, for going to school, and mostly for having learned to read and write. Pap talks about illiteracy as though its a mark of family pride, and hes outraged that Huck would try to be better than his father. Then he asks for the money. Huck tells him the truth, and when he finally accepts it, Pap says hell go to Judge Thatcher. Of course he cant get the money, because the deal Huck made with the judge was completely legal.
Pap does win one legal battle, though. Judge Thatcher and Widow Douglas go to court to have Huck taken from his father and placed in their care. The judge in the case, a new man in town, rules against them, even though he knows their intentions are good. This same judge then decides to reform Pap by inviting him to stay at his house.
After supper, Pap announces that he will never drink again, and he and the judge cry and carry on about the new life Pap is going to lead. That night, Pap sneaks out of the judges house, sells the coat the judge gave him, and spends the money on liquor. They find him the next morning sleeping on the ground, dead drunk, with a broken arm. The judge was probably the only person in town who was surprised. CHAPTE Once Pap regains control of himself, he hires a lawyer to sue Judge Thatcher for the money that once belonged to Huck. Although he occasionally catches Huck and beats him for going to school, Huck continues to go, to spite his father.
Then one day Pap kidnaps his son and brings him to a log cabin on the Illinois shore, on the other side of the river. Whenever hes away, Pap keeps Huck locked in the cabin. But when his father is there, they fish and hunt or just hang around doing not much of anything. Except for the imprisonment, Huck finds he likes getting back to his old style of living, and he doesnt want to go back to the widows home any more.
The trouble is, he cant stay with Pap, either. His father beats him more and more, until Huck decides to work out an escape plan. He finds a saw and cuts a hole in the cabin wall, then covers it up to wait for a chance to get out, while his father is away. Soon after this, Pap comes back from town in a terrible mood. He starts drinking and complaining about the courts, the widow, and a number of other things.
After a few drinks, he goes into a long speech about the government. This speech is important in at least one way- it shows how Twain felt about racial bigotry. Pap complains about not getting justice from his government, when he has had all the anxiety and expense of raising a son. We know, however, that this isnt true, that Pap has been about as bad a father as anyone can imagine. We know that he isnt the good citizen he claims to be. And we know that his threat to leave the country is laughable, considering what an undesirable character he is.
As he does with Huck, Twain is talking over Paps head to the reader, and we know how Twain wants us to feel. The same thing is true in the second part of Paps harangue, in which he berates the government for allowing a black college professor to vote right along with a white man like himself. Twain makes Pap look ridiculous for suggesting that he is superior to the professor, simply because hes white. Huck listens to all this, waiting for Pap to fall asleep so he can slip out of the cabin. Unfortunately, Pap has a restless night and never completely falls asleep. He has a nightmare, in which he fights off the angel of death.
Then he confuses Huck with the angel and starts attacking him. When he finally falls asleep, Huck takes the rifle from the wall and loads it. He sits there quietly, hoping his father wont attack him again. CHAPTE When Pap wakes up, he doesnt remember anything about attacking Huck as the angel of death, and he wants to know why Huck is asleep in a chair with the rifle in his lap. Huck is afraid he wont believe the truth, so he says that somebody tried to break in during the night. You remember that Huck gave away more than $ 6000 to avoid having to tell a lie to his father.
How can he lie so easily in this situation? Later in the book, Huck himself will give you an answer to that question. In the meantime, think about whether you see any difference between the lie he refused to tell and this one. While hes out getting some fish for breakfast, Huck sees an abandoned canoe drifting by. He wades out and gets the canoe and hides it in the woods.
An escape plan is beginning to form in his head. Hes glad he lied to Pap about somebody trying to break in, because that lie will help him in his plan. After dinner, Pap goes to town to sell some logs. Huck is sure he wont be back until morning, which will give him plenty of time to put his escape plan into effect. Read the description of Huck's escape carefully.
Its a pretty elaborate plan, worked out to the smallest detail, obviously the work of a bright kid. In the middle of his description, Huck says he wishes Tom Sawyer were with him to throw in the fancy touches. When you read it, youll see that this plan doesnt need the kind of fancy touches Tom would add. Its complete as it is, and unlike Toms make-believe adventures, this escape is the real thing. The plan is intended to make everyone think Huck was murdered. This is important to him, since he isnt running away only from his father.
Hes running from Judge Thatcher, too, and the Widow Douglas, and all the other people he knows. Hes determined to set out on his own and to leave behind his whole life up until this night. As long as no one is looking for a living Huck, he figures he can stop anywhere he wants to take time to make further plans. He decides on nearby Jacksons Island as his temporary hideout. Then, satisfied with the ways things are working, he lies down in the canoe and falls asleep. When he wakes up, he hears someone rowing toward his island, and he soon discovers its Pap, coming back earlier than Huck expected.
He unhitches the canoe and floats downstream as quietly as possible. Something happens at this point in the narration that you should pay special attention to. It will happen again and again throughout the book, and youll want to recognize it when it does. What happens is that Huck describes what its like on the river. It begins with The sky looks ever so deep. Whenever Huck talks about living on the river, his tone of voice changes.
His language becomes gentler and less harsh than usual. Sometimes he becomes almost poetic. Imagine a friend talking to you about a date, or about sports, or cars, or any subject you both have in common. Then suppose the friend suddenly shifted to talking about a much-loved baby brother.
Think of the probable contrast in your friends language and tone of voice. Huck loves the Mississippi River the way most of us love people. If you want to know how much Mark Twain loved the river, read Life on the Mississippi some time. For now, you can get some idea of Twain's feeling by paying close attention to Huck's descriptions, beginning with the short, affectionate one we get in this chapter. Huck gets to Jacksons Island just before daybreak.
He hides his canoe in some willow branches, then lies down to take a nap before breakfast. CHAPTE Huck wakes after daybreak feeling rested and rather comfortable and satisfied. He seems to have forgotten last nights harrowing experience, and he lies in the grass enjoying the sun, the trees, and a couple of friendly-looking squirrels. He feels completely at home. Hes torn from this pleasant state by the sound of cannon fire. He gets up to see a ferry boat moving toward the island.
He knows its filled with people searching the water for his dead body. From a hiding place at the shore, Huck watches as the ferry comes so close to the island that he can almost reach out and touch the people on it. He sees his father, Tom Sawyer, the widow, the judge- almost everybody he knows is on that ferry searching for him. He looks into those familiar faces, and he doesnt make a sound.
NOTE: If you ever considered running away from home when you were young, you might want to think about this scene for a minute. A lot of kids fantasize about doing it, and the fantasy often involves grief-stricken relatives and friends. Fortunately, most people never do run away from home, because they decide they need those relatives and friends more than they need freedom. Huck is hiding on the island, having successfully fooled everyone he knows into thinking hes dead. Now he comes face to face with all those people. Imagine yourself in that situation.
Most of us would probably abandon the idea of running, and yell out, Here I am! Im not really dead! That would seem to be the natural response if you were suddenly confronted by everyone whos close to you. But it isnt Huck's response.
He just crouches there silently, letting everyone in his life float by. can look at this incident in a number of ways. Maybe it shows that Huck is so much in control of his emotions that he doesnt do the natural thing. Maybe it shows that none of these people really means anything to him, in spite of what hes told us. Or it might show that he doesnt understand how sorrowful some of those people are.
Since he doesnt think much of himself, hed find it hard to believe that someone else thinks much of him. All these interpretations are possible, as well as some others that may occur to you. Even if you arent ready to interpret the incident in one particular way, keep it in mind as you read on. Youll learn other things about Huck, and you may be able to interpret this better later on. Once the ferry is gone, Huck is overcome by loneliness. He listens to the river and watches the stars for a while, then decides to go to sleep.
There aint no better way to put in time when you are lonesome, he says. He sounds as though hes had this problem before. After three days on the island, Huck makes a terrifying discovery. The remains of a campfire tell him that he isnt alone.
As frightened as he is, he decides that he has to find out who the other person is. After a long search, he finds himself back at the campfire. This time theres a man sleeping near it. He waits quietly until the man wakes up and throws the blanket off his face. When Huck sees that its Miss Watsons slave, Jim, he skips from his hiding place to say hello. It takes him a while to convince Jim that he isnt seeing a ghost.
He explains how he created the illusion that he was dead, and Jim says it was a hoax worthy of Tom Sawyer himself. Then Huck asks Jim why hes on the island. Jim first makes him promise not to tell anyone. When Huck promises, Jim confesses that he has run away from Miss Watson. Notice Huck's shocked reaction to this news. Remember that he grew up with people who believed that stealing a slave was as serious as committing murder.
A modern equivalent of a runaway slave might be someone who murders a police officer. Huck's shock is an expression of this belief. Hes never heard anyone question the institution of slavery, and he has every reason to believe that Jim has done something terrible. All of this makes the next part of the conversation interesting. Jim reminds Huck that he promised not to tell. Without hesitating, Huck says hell keep his word.
He realizes that people would call me a low-down Abolitionist and despise me for keeping mum. And he really believes those people would be right. But hell keep his word. I aint a-going back there, anyways, he explains. Not turning Jim in is a monumental decision for Huck to make, even though he makes it on the spot. This is not just a boy running away from home.
Its someone who has decided to turn his back on everything home stands for, even one of its most cherished beliefs. The rest of the chapter includes three things you may find interesting. First, Jim explains why hes running away and how he got to the island. Then he does what might qualify as a comedy monologue on things that foreshadow bad luck.
The last part of the chapter might remind you of comedy teams in which one person provides all the straight lines and the other does all the jokes. Jim tells a long story about a time when he had some money. The routine ends with a punch line that might give you a clue to how Twain felt about slavery when he wrote this book. CHAPTE Neither Huck nor Jim has any intention of going back to the village; so, without actually stating it, theyve decided to be outcasts together. This chapter shows them starting out on their new life. Huck leads Jim to a cavern he found while he was exploring the island.
Jim convinces him that they should carry all their gear up to this place because there are going to be heavy rains. Huck doesnt like having to do all that work, but he decides to go along. Sure enough, the rain begins right after dinner. Huck gives another of his poetic descriptions when he tells about the rain. He seems to be perfectly satisfied with his new life. It rains for so many days that the river floods.
Huck and Jim take the canoe out from time to time to see what they can find. On one of their trips, they retrieve a 12 x 16 -foot raft, well-built and sturdy. They bring it back to the island for possible use later. On another outing, they climb into the window of a two-story house thats floating by.
In one room they find the body of a man who has been shot in the back. Jim covers the mans face to keep Huck from seeing it. Jims behavior might be a little puzzling here, but it will be explained later. He seems to be trying to keep Huck away from the body.
Huck, however, isnt much interested in seeing it. They ransack the house for equipment and supplies they may need. Then they go back to the security of their island. CHAPTER 10 The next morning Huck wonders aloud how the dead man was killed. Jim says it would be bad luck to talk about it. He adds that unburied corpses are more likely to haunt people than buried ones.
That sounds reasonable to Huck, so he drops the subject. Most of this chapter is about bad luck and its causes. As you read it, you should be able to detect Mark Twain in the background, having a laugh over some of the superstitions he believed when he was a boy. Huck tells us that after he handled some snakeskin, Jim warned him that bad luck was coming. Sure enough, three days later Jim is bitten by a rattlesnake because of something Huck has done. Even though Huck is directly responsible for what happens to Jim, he counts this as the bad luck that Jim predicted.
Twain is probably making a small joke here about how superstitious people will go out of their way to find things that make their superstitions seem true. But hes also setting us up for another joke on the same topic. Huck tells us a story about Hank Bunker, who waited a full two years before his bad luck finally showed up. The funniest part of the story is the description of what happened to the man and how he was buried. NOTE: The subject of good and bad luck comes up often in Huck's narration, and you might have suspected by now that its more than simply a way for Twain to get some laughs.
Jims attitude toward the supernatural, for example, should tell you something about his self-image and about his view of the world. Maybe you remember a conversation the two had when they first met on the island in Chapter 8. Huck asked Jim why he never talked about signs of good luck, why he dwelt so much on bad omens. Jims response was that, first, there are very few signs of good luck; and second, that good luck wasnt the sort of thing you had to know about in advance. To Jim, the world is an endlessly threatening place. Danger is hiding behind every tree and under every rock.
At any moment, everything you have could be taken away from you by forces over which you have no control. If you can imagine growing up as a slave in 19 th-century America, you can understand how Jim could have developed such a view of life. A slave had no status as a human being; he could be beaten or even killed by a master; he was a piece of property who could be sold on a whim, even if that meant permanent separation from his own family. To someone who grew up under conditions like these, dark and unexplained forces could become a part of everyday life.
But how about Huck? Does the same explanation hold true for him? Its true that Huck has had his share of hardship; you dont have to look any farther than Pap. To a kid, the unpredictable behavior of a cruel, drunken father is no less frightening than the things a slave had to worry about all the time. That unwarranted and unpredictable cruelty could help to explain why Huck has such a low opinion of himself. If his own father treats him like a piece of dirt, he probably finds it easy to believe that he is a piece of dirt.
And if his own father could turn on him in an instant and suddenly start beating him, Huck might find it easy to believe that the world is filled with unexplained forces that could ruin his life just as suddenly. Still, there are at least two differences between Jim and Huck. One is that Huck is white. No matter how badly he thinks of himself, somewhere, deep inside, he knows that theres at least a chance that he could be a respectable person some day. For Jim, that would be inconceivable.
A second difference is that Huck is a boy, on his way to becoming an adult. Hes also inclined to examine ideas before accepting or rejecting them. So he asks a lot of questions about the omens that Jim believes with all his heart. In most cases Huck ends up accepting what Jim tells him. But that doesnt mean he always will. He still has the potential of learning and of outgrowing things he now believes.
As you read on, youll see some of this taking place. The chapter ends with Huck dressing up as a girl so he can go to town and find out the latest news about him and Jim. He puts on a dress and a bonnet that they took from the floating house the night before. After paddling the canoe to the mainland, he finds himself outside the house of someone who has just moved into town. CHAPTER 11 In this chapter the question of lying will come up again.
You remember that Huck gave up $ 6000 to avoid having to tell his father a lie. In this chapter youll see him concoct tales about himself with all the confidence of an experienced artist painting a portrait. He not only has no qualms about telling such lies, he seems to enjoy it (and hes very good at it, besides). As you read the chapter, think about his apparently contradictory attitude toward telling the truth. He goes into the womans house and presents himself as a girl on her way to her uncles house at the other end of town. He gets the woman to talking, and when she finally gets around to the stuff that matters, he learns that Pap has disappeared and that Jim is a prime suspect in Huck's murder.
Worse than that, the woman has seen campfire smoke on Jacksons Island. Her husband is planning to go there with a friend late that night to hunt for the runaway slave and collect the reward. In his nervousness over hearing this news, Huck starts fooling with the womans sewing equipment. She watches him try to thread a needle, and the way he does it makes her suspicious.
She then comes up with two other tests for Huck, and the way he reacts convinces her shes talking to a boy, not a girl. Has Huck's real identity been discovered? Huck is too quick witted to let that happen. He admits that the woman is right, but makes up a sad story about the terrible events that led him to try this disguise. The woman not only believes him; she offers him some advice on how to act more like a girl, and she prepares a snack for him to have on the rest of his trip. (Youll have to decide for yourself on the reliability of the womans tests for the differences between males and females. ) As soon as Huck's out of the womans sight, he races to the canoe and paddles back to the island. He stops first at the north end and lights a campfire to attract the men who will be looking for Jim.
Then he goes to the south end and rouses Jim. When Huck says Theyre after us! , Jim acts quickly, without asking questions. They pack everything they own on the raft, push it out, and silently leave the island. Their long journey down the Mississippi River has begun. CHAPTER 12 With this chapter, the main part of the book begins. Chapters 12 and 13 deal with Huck and Jims first adventure while traveling along the Mississippi.
Huck begins by telling us that Jim built a wigwam on the raft so they could keep their things dry, and he even built a fire when it rained. (Keep in mind that the raft is 12 x 16 feet, about as big as a large bedroom in many modern houses. ) He gives us another of his quietly moving descriptions of living on the river, including a comment on seeing the city of St. Louis for the first time. He describes going ashore late each night to buy food and to borrow things they couldnt afford. This section includes some interesting distinctions between stealing and borrowing.
Theres no doubt that Twain intended the distinctions to be funny; but they also remind us that Huck has a private set of moral standards. The standards may be unconventional, and sometimes laughable, but he does try to live up to them, and thats an important thing to remember. Then comes the incident with the disabled steamboat, the Walter Scott. In using this name for a ship that was on the verge of sinking, Twain was probably making a small joke. Sir Walter Scott, author of Ivanhoe and other romantic novels, was a popular novelist in the 19 th century.
Twain often wrote scathing criticisms of such novels, believing that they were written by hacks who knew little about the real world and nothing about the people who live in it. NOTE: Twain has Huck describe his search of the steamboat in some detail, and he uses a number of nautical terms you might find confusing. Heres a brief glossary that should make your reading a bit more enjoyable: TEXAS A shelter for officers on the upper deck, also called the texas deck PILOT-HOUSE An enclosed structure from which the ship is navigated DERRICK A device for lifting cargo on or off the ship LABBOARD (larboard) The left side of the ship STABBOARD (starboard) The right side GUYS Ropes or cables SKYLIGHT The pilot-house roof, which can be opened and closed Against Jims wishes, they climb aboard the steamboat to see what they can find. When they hear voices, Jim races back to the raft, but Huck is too curious to leave without finding out whats going on.
The justification he uses is interesting: Tom Sawyer wouldnt back out now. After all the things that have happened to Huck, and even now, in the midst of something really dangerous, he still sees himself as a follower of a boy who holds up Sunday School picnics and steals turnips. When he finds out that the voices belong to three thieves, and that murder is part of their plan, Huck decides to get out. Jim gives him the bad news that the raft has broken loose, and the chapter ends with a cliffhanger. CHAPTER 13 Huck knows that a steamboat always has a small boat- a skiff- thats used for taking one or two people ashore in shallow water, and he and Jim start looking for it.
They almost lose their chance at the skiff, since two of the thieves plan on using it themselves; they mean to abandon the third to sink along with the steamboat. But greed interrupts their escape, and the two thieves go back inside to get some money theyve left behind. Huck and Jim get into the skiff, cut it loose, and silently slip away. As soon as theyre free, Huck begins to worry- not about himself and Jim, but about the three men they have left stranded. He thinks of how dreadful it was, even for murderers, to be in such a fix, and he tells Jim he wants to go ashore and try to get some help for them. They find the raft, load it with the thieves loot from the skiff, and climb aboard.
Then Huck arranges for a meeting place with Jim and rows the skiff to the shore. The scene that follows is interesting in two respects. First, youll see Huck once again proving himself a champion liar- or yarn spinner, as Twain probably would have preferred to think of him. In order to save the three criminals from almost certain drowning, he tells a ferryboat captain an elaborate tale about his family being stranded on the disabled steamboat. The second thing to note about the scene is Huck's quick mind and his understanding of what makes people tick. Early in the conversation the captain makes a chance reference to someone named Jim Hornback.
Huck is shrewd enough to figure out how the captain feels about Hornback, and he works the mans name into his plea for help. When he leaves the captain, Huck feels better for having done what he could to help the men. I wished the widow know about it, he says. I judged she would be proud of me for helping these rapscallions, because rapscallions and dead-beats is the kind the widow and good people takes the most interest in. What Huck is referring to here- without realizing it, of course- is the traditional Christian belief that sinners deserve more help than the rest of us.
Several of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament make this point. Huck doesnt understand why good people would be most interested in helping rapscallions and deadbeats, but his instinctive urge to help such lowlife puts him much closer to at least one Christian ideal than almost everybody he comes across in this novel. CHAPTER 14 Read Chapters 14 to 16 together and youll see three important developments. First, the relationship between Huck and Jim begins to change, in a way that Huck would never have considered possible. Second, Huck has serious doubts about the morality of helping a slave escape. And third, the two of them are separated by an accident on the river.
You might find several different layers of meaning in Chapter 14. Ill talk about two of them here. The first level is the comic one. Huck and Jim have a conversation thats similar to dozens youve seen in movies and TV comedies, usually with comedy teams. In this classic comedy situation, two characters are talking about a subject, and neither one knows very much about it. But one of the characters is the dominant one, in charge of the situation, maybe even the bully.
The audience knows that theyre both uninformed, and thats where the laughs come from. The dominant character always wins the argument, of course, but not because he or she really knows more. If you arent familiar with Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello, you may remember Lucy and Ethel from the TV series I Love Lucy. All three pairs of comedians used this kind of comedy routine, and earlier in the book Twain used it himself, when Tom Sawyer called Huck a perfect saphead for not understanding things. (Hell use it again, often. ) In this chapter Huck is the dominant character because hes white. He and Jim talk about the Old Testament story of King Solomon, who had a reputation for being wise. In the biblical story, two women came to him to settle a dispute over who is the real mother of the baby that one of them was carrying.
Solomon said there was no way to settle the dispute, and he ordered that the baby be cut in two, and one half be given to each woman. One woman said that was fine with her; the other was appalled at the suggestion and offered to give up her claim to allow the baby to live. Solomon concluded that the second woman was the real mother and gave the baby to her. Jim contends that no really wise man would have suggested cutting a baby in two as a solution to a dispute. Huck tries to tell him hes missing the point, but Jim is adamant in contending that it was a stupid thing to do. The outcome of the argument is the second level of meaning in the chapter.
The important thing to notice is that Huck gives in without winning the argument. Huck is willing to lose an argument to a slave; and Jim dares to argue with a white person until he wins. Without realizing it, both characters have undergone a radical change in their attitudes, a change that would have shocked just about everyone they both knew. The chapter ends with a second argument, which Jim also wins. This one shows Twain having some fun with one of his favorite targets- the French. He had a powerful bias against the French people, the French language, and- most of all- Americans who spoke French and wore French clothing to show how sophisticated they were.
He gets in a little dig at these people at the end of Chapter 14. One other point: showing off his superior knowledge, Huck tells Jim that the son of the French king is the dolphin. The real word is dauphin, pronounced doe-FAN. Its only a small joke here, but the word will come up again later in the novel. CHAPTER 15 Huck figures that theyre now only three nights away from Cairo, Illinois, the point at which theyll be in a free state and Jim can stop running. The next night, though, they run into a heavy fog.
Huck gets into the canoe to look for a place to tie the raft to, and he loses the raft. What follows is another detailed description of the river; this one, though, is not touching, but frightening. Huck goes on for three full pages, telling us exactly what he did to try to get together with Jim in the fog, and its easy to hear the experienced voice of Mark Twain, river pilot, in this passage. When he finally does find the raft, Jim is sound asleep at the steering oar, and Huck decides to play a prank on him. He wakes Jim and pretends nothing has happened. Jim figures he must have dreamed the whole thing, and he goes through an elaborate interpretation of what each detail symbolized.
When hes finished, Huck shows him that it really did happen, and that hes just been the butt of a joke. Jims reaction to this is very emotional- and very daring for a slave who hasnt reached a free state yet. He says he was ready to die when he thought hed lost Huck. He adds that anyone who would play such a prank on a friend is trash. Try to imagine it. Try to reconstruct the relationship that existed between all white people and all black people in a Southern state in the middle of the 19 th century.
All his life, Jim has known that he could be hanged for talking to a white person- any white person- the way he has talked to Huck. As for Huck, all his life hes known that he has the right to have such a black person hanged. But this knowledge doesnt stop Jim from saying what he feels, because he no longer thinks of Huck as a white person. He thinks of him as a friend. Huck is a little less certain. It was fifteen minutes, he tells us, before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger.
But he does it. He apologizes to Jim who, at least for the moment, is his friend, and not a black man. This apology sets the stage for the next chapter, when Huck makes an enormously important moral decision. CHAPTER 16 As they get closer and closer to Cairo, both Huck and Jim begin getting fidgety. Jims nervousness stems, of course, from his closeness to freedom, something he might never have dreamed of before his impulsive decision to run away. Huck, however, is troubled by his gradual realization of exactly what hes doing.
For the first time, he begins thinking about what it means to help a slave escape from his owner. As weve seen in earlier chapters, Huck has a sense of right and wrong that would shame some of the people he refers to as his betters. His conscience is now causing him a great deal of pain because he cant find an easy solution to his dilemma. Does he live up to the rules of the society hes been brought up in? Or does he do what seems to be the right thing for a friend? When he hears Jim talk about getting an Abolitionist to help him steal his children- children that belong to someone Huck doesnt even know- Huck freezes with fear.
At that point his conscience tells him to do the right thing- to turn the runaway slave in. With the excuse that hes going to see how far they are from Cairo, Huck begins paddling the canoe to shore so he can tell the authorities about Jim. He loses some of his resolve, however, when his friend calls out that Huck is the only white gentleman who ever kept his promise to old Jim. On his way to the shore hes stopped by two men looking for runaway slaves. Hes now faced directly with the choice of doing the right thing or turning his friend in.
He decides to do wrong. He tells the men hes traveling with a white man. I want man enough, he tells us. Hadnt the spunk of a rabbit. It never occurs to him that what hes done might be considered the right thing. He has too low an opinion of himself to think that.
Instead, he makes excuses for acting the way he did. NOTE: Huck feels terrible for having done wrong. But if he had turned Jim in, he certainly wouldnt have felt any better. So why do right, he reasons, when it doesnt feel any better? What hes trying to work out here is a conflict that everyone has to face many times in life. Do you live by the rules that someone else has taught you, even if they dont make much sense to you?
Or do you follow your own conscience, even if all the people you know live by the rules they were taught? Theres no question about which answer Twain favors. He has pitted slavery against friendship, and that stacks the deck in favor of individual conscience over the rules of society. But the same conflict comes up in other situations, where the opposing forces arent as clearcut as slavery versus friendship. In those situations it may be a lot harder to decide which action to take. This is one of the reasons that some people disapprove of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, especially for young readers.
They say that the book glorifies a lawbreaker by making him likable and by manipulating the audience into approving of what he does. This is the same criticism that is often leveled at movies like The Godfather, or TV shows in which police officers break the law in order to catch criminals. So the larger moral question of conscience versus society's rules is one youll have to work out for yourself, probably dozens of times. But in the context of the novel, there really isnt any question.
Huck has done the right thing, no matter how strongly he insists that hes been bad. As the chapter comes to an end, the raft is split in two by a carelessly piloted steamboat. The vivid description of what it was like to see that boat coming and to be on the raft when it hit is one of the best passages in the book. Read it slowly to get its full effect. After hes been separated from Jim, Huck makes his way to shore.
He finds himself surrounded by a pack of barking dogs, and he knows enough not to move. CHAPTER 17 NOTE: The word satire is used in different ways. The dictionary gives more than one definition, and a whole list of synonyms. Without getting involved in any technical definitions, Im going to use satirize to mean
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