Appunti

Is a 1884 novel by Mark Twain.

According to Ernest Hemingway, it was the «one book» from which «all modern American literature» came, and contemporary critics and scholars have treated it as one of the great American novels.

The story is told in first person by Huck Finn and takes place on the Mississippi River («forty to fifty years ago») along which travel Huck and Jim on their raft.
Jim is a runaway slave and Huck helps him to escape toward the free states, where slavery is prohibited. The novel is filled with rich descriptions of the river and the colorful people who lived along it.

Year in which the book takes place

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn appears to take place in or about the year 1839. The author gives several indications of this. In the Foreword he describes the events as taking place «forty to fifty years ago».

Huck Finn is a poor boy with a drunken bum for a father, Huck is the best friend of Tom Sawyer;

Tom Sawyer is a middle-class boy with an imagination too active. He is the main character of the previous novel of Twain and Huck Finn was initially conceived by the author as a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer;

Jim is a runaway slave who accompanies Huck Finn down the Mississipi River. He runs away from Miss Watson after hearing that she wanted to sell him to a trader from down south.

The King and the Duke an elder and a young man with whom Huck is forced to travel. They are later tarred and feathered in Pikesville.

SUMMARY

At the end of the previous novel Huck and Tom Sawyer found a robber’s stash of gold and Huck was adopted by the widow Douglas and her sister miss Watson who try to civilize him.
As Huckleberry Finn opens, Huck is none too thrilled with his new life of cleanliness, manners, church, and school.
Anyway all is well and good until Huck’s father, Pap, reappears in town and demands Huck’s money.
«Pap» was a brutish and drunken man. When the Widow Douglas warns him to stay away from her house, he 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.
So they start downriver on the raft toward the free states, where slavery is prohibited.
During the journey they have a lot of adventures encountering gang of robbers, slaves escaped hunters, families in fight… even two fraudsters who claim to be a displaced English duke (the duke) and the long-lost heir to the French throne (the dauphin).
The duke and the king pull several scams in the small towns along the river.
After a few more small scams, the duke and the king 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. But, as he 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 along the house’s way and Tom pretends to be his own younger brother, Sid.
Tom hatches a crazy plan to free Jim, adding all sorts of useless obstacles.
Tom Sawyer leads Huck through elaborate machinations to rescue Jim. 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.

STYLE

Something new happened in Huck Finn that had never happened in American literature before.
It was a book, as many critics have observed, that served as a Declaration of Independence from the genteel English novel tradition.
Twain used accents and slang words to bring his characters to life. Huckleberry Finn was different from anything most Americans had ever read.
Twain wrote dialogue for his characters that made them sound like real people. He didn’t make all his characters sound the same; instead they each had a unique voice. Indeed the novel contains different kind of writing: a fresh, no-nonsense, earthy vernacular kind of writing loaded by immediacy and energy.

THEMES

The novel faces many themes, the primary one is the conflict between civilization and «natural life».
Huck represents natural life against the rules of the society represented by the Widow Douglas.
As well the river can be considered a character who represents freedom.
The theme of slavery is perhaps the most well known aspect of this novel.

Twain was vehemently anti-slavery. It is easy to see that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn provides an allegory to explain how and why slavery is wrong. He employed humor to involve his readers in issues of justice and morality, but he faces also the themes of religion and superstition.
About the themes aroused by the novel, many critics have deprecated the final chapters, as a betrayal in conflict with the previous ones.
They claim that the book end devolves into a little show comedy.
Despite a few critics as Eliot and Leo Marx have defended the last chapters, many readers were disappointed by the novel’s end.

CENSURE

The novel was controversial from the outset and has been banned on social grounds.
Many libraries banned it from their stacks, an act that attracted a lot of publicity and discussion in the press.
In 1885 it was banned from the Concord Public Library that found offensive «the street vernacular spoken by Jim and Huck, as well as their coarse behavior», and called the book «trash suitable only for the slums».
So it was condemned by many reviewers in MT’s time as coarse and inelegant or not elevating, but was also condemned by many commentators in our time as racist because racial terms as «nigger» are frequently used in the novel.
This is true, but the references and treatment of African Americans in the novel reflect the time about which it was written.
According to the critic Lionel Trilling «Nigger is the only word for a Negro that a boy like Huck would know in his place and time [...] it is a fact that forms part of our national history, and a national history is not made up of pleasant and creditabile things only». Nevertheless to include the novel in schools and library publishers was often forced to update its language, changing the word «nigger» with «servant», «folks» or «hand».

Mark Twain

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in the town of Florida, Missouri, in 1835.
When he was four years old, his family moved to Hannibal, a town on the Mississippi River much like the towns depicted in his two most famous novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

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