VI.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Almost as soon as Tom Sawyer was completed Twain planned a companion story, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Begun in 1876 it was repeatedly put aside but finally published in 1884. With Huckleberry Finn, generally considered his masterpiece, Twain reach the highest level of his creativity. Especially outstanding is Twain’s portrayal of the freethinking, pioneer spirit of Huck, who fights pretense and hypocrisy with good-humored common sense. Huck’s adventures also provide the reader with a panorama of American life along the Mississippi before the Civil War. Twain’s skill in capturing the rhythms of that life helps make the book one of the classics of American literature.

The story is narrated by Huck, a rough, good-natured boy of little education but keen intelligence, who lives with the Widow Douglas. Huck is kidnapped by his shiftless father, who keeps him prisoner in an isolated cabin. The boy escapes and, together with a runaway slave, Jim, sails down the Mississippi on a raft. During their trip, Huck and Jim encounter many unusual characters, including two families involved in a senseless feud and a pair of scoundrels who swindle innocent townspeople. Their experiences bring about a strong friendship between the boy and the slave, but their adventures end when Jim is captured and held at the farm of Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Sally. When Tom comes to visit his aunt, he, with Huck’s reluctant help, concocts a fantastic but unsuccessful scheme to free Jim. Huck later learns that Jim has long since been granted his freedom by his former owner.

Faced with the prospect of being adopted by Aunt Sally, the self-reliant Huck decides to go West, saying: “I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” Thus Huck becomes the symbol of untamed America, someone who will not bow to the conventions of a society that is crowding in on him. The novel is a masterpiece in its choice of episodes that reveal the conflicts of the age, in its dramatic tensions, its folklore, its varied cast of characters, and its naturalness of language.

The adventures of Huck and Jim show Huck (and the reader) the cruelty of which people are capable. Another theme of the novel is the conflict between Huck’s feelings of friendship with Jim, who is one of the few people he can trust, and his knowledge that he is breaking the laws of the time by helping Jim escape. In one of the book’s most powerful scenes Huck decides that, even if it means committing a sin, he won’t return Jim to slavery: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.”

Unlike Tom Sawyer, in which a mature narrator recalls his youth, Huckleberry Finn is told in the first person, through the mouth of a 13- or 14-year-old boy. To keep the narration plausibly within the limits of Huck’s mental and emotional development was a triumph in itself. But additionally, American backwoods vernacular (everyday speech), previously used only in low-life satire, here became a literary instrument for the first time. Moreover, the vernacular is applied to a cross section of pre-Civil War Southern society, from its dregs (Huck’s father) to its aristocracy. It takes numerous readings to grasp the subtlety with which social levels are differentiated and to understand that the book’s true hero is Jim.