50 pages • 1 hour read
Mark TwainA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“NOTICE: Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
This epigrammatic warning shot is among the most quotable lines in Twain’s unusually quotable career. Much of 19th-century American literature was openly moralistic and reformative in rhetoric and tone, and so Twain’s opening strategy here is to disarm the reader. Indeed, the book was popular with children, its intended audience, who found little trace of the Sunday school atmosphere Huck himself so abhorred.
“In this book a number of dialects are used […] I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.”
Modern readers are accustomed to books written partially or entirely in regional dialect, but Twain’s readers were not. The initial controversy surrounding The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn did not concern slavery, as it does now, but the idea that children would read “vulgarities” such as the contraction “ain’t,” thus taking them as normal.
“You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’ but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.”
Later, Huck will claim authorship of his own book, stating on the last page that if he’d known how difficult it would be to write a book, he wouldn’t have done it. While The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was written from a third-person perspective, this sequel is told from Huck’s limited and unreliable first-person perspective.
“I says to myself, if a body can get anything they pray for, why don’t Deacon Winn get back the money he lost on pork? Why can’t the widow get back her silver snuff-box that was stole?”
Huck is constantly presented with moral absolutes that don’t match with their ethical modes of conduct. When asked merely to do good and to pray, Huck always returns to practical questions of to whom, and in what context, one should perform these recommended good works
“Dey’s two angels hoverin’ roun’ ’bout him. One uv ’em is white en shiny, en t’other one is black. De white one gits him to go right, a little while, den de black one sail in en bust it all up.”
The secondary characters in Huck’s story present him with such binary choices between good and evil, but Huck’s reality is far grayer. This is due both to his formative age as well as his marginal place in society; Huck is still learning his world and his place in it, as is typical in a coming-of-age story.
“He reckoned a body could reform the ole man with a shot-gun, maybe, but he didn’t know no other way.”
The character of pap takes up a large space in the narrative architecture, though he only appears in a few early chapters. If Miss Watson is the compromised angel on Huck’s right shoulder, pap is the devil on his left. Townsfolk like the judge consider pap irredeemable, but Huck continues to sort through his feelings about his father and refers to pap’s “wisdom” when it comes time to perform small but necessary crimes like petty theft.
“I was the boss of it; it all belonged to me, so to say, and I wanted to know all about it; but mainly I wanted to put in the time.”
On Jackson Island Huck gets his first taste of freedom, and it feels indistinguishable to him from ownership. At the end of the novel, Huck declares his intention to go west, presumably so he can continue this feeling of expansiveness and ownership.
“Jim said bees wouldn’t sting idiots; but I didn’t believe that, because I had tried them lots of times myself, and they wouldn’t sting me.”
Telling inversions like these are the source of Twain’s rhetorical cleverness and part of the fun of reading him. They allow him to subtly distinguish his characters from their self-presentations. In other instances, this clever wordplay allows Twain to convey moral lessons he would otherwise shy from having his characters speak aloud.
“Yes—en I’s rich now, come to look at it. I owns myself, en I’s wuth eight hund’d dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn’ want no mo’.”
The ideology that takes slavery as a natural and normalized part of everyday life is held not only by Miss Watson, who plainly benefits from it, and Huck, who doesn’t, but also by Jim, slavery’s target and victim. It’s worth noting that later, when defending Jim against a mob, the doctor declares Jim’s worth, as evidenced by his loyalty and bravery, to be at least $1,000 or more.
“I begun to think how dreadful it was, even for murderers, to be in such a fix. I says to myself, there ain’t no telling but I might come to be a murderer myself, yet, and then how would I like it?”
Huck’s extraordinary quality is his ability and willingness to empathize. Understanding himself as a compromised ethical actor, Huck is naturally able to take the viewpoint of the criminals on the boat. This tendency is as likely to get Huck in trouble as it is to keep him out of it as the novel proceeds.
“I told Jim all about what happened inside the wreck, and at the ferry-boat; and I said these kinds of things was adventures; but he said he didn’t want no more adventures.”
This is the first significant pushback by Jim, who points out that the difference between Huck getting caught and Jim getting caught is the difference between mild punishment for Huck and death for Jim. Later in the narrative, at least until Tom returns, Huck is more likely to take Jim’s lead on how to proceed.
“He said he’d be mighty sure to see it, because he’d be a free man the minute he seen it, but if he missed it he’d be in the slave country again and no more show for freedom. […] Jim said it made him all over trembly and feverish to be so close to freedom.”
Here Jim refers to the missed Cairo crossing that would have allowed them passage to the abolitionist Northeastern free states rather than the questionable freedom of a place like Illinois, teeming with slavecatchers. After missing this crossing, however, Twain offers little to explain why the protagonists continue moving south.
“Thinks I, this is what comes of my not thinking. Here was this n***** which I had as good as helped to run away, coming out right flat-footed and saying he would steal his children—children that belonged to a man I didn’t even know; a man that hadn’t done me no harm.”
Though they lay at the heart of his motivation, Jim only talks of his children in one instance, a touching retelling of how he discovered his daughter’s loss of hearing. This comes later in the story. Here, Huck misses the point of Jim’s humanity entirely, still puzzling through Christian morality and raw economics in the abstract.
“Well, then, says I, what’s the use you learning to do right, when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages just the same?”
While not yet prepared to commit his soul to hell in preservation of Jim’s freedom, Huck’s already tenuous religious education takes a real beating when he considers the price of helping his friend. What use is Miss Watson’s severe notion of Christian right and wrong when she herself is the cause of Jim’s terror and flight?
“I wished I hadn’t ever come ashore that night, to see such things. I ain’t never going to get shut of them—lots of times I dream about them.”
Twain spares us the worst details, but the result of the Grangerford and Shepardson skirmish leaves every male member of the otherwise friendly and sympathetic Grangerford family dead. The details were unnecessary; the bloody American Civil War still existed within living memory, and most readers would have understood the human cost of battle.
“We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and comfortable on a raft.”
Huck and Jim’s best moments happen on the raft, which serves not only as a conveyance within the logic of the story but also as a conveyance for the novel’s plot. It is fitting, then, that Twain includes this gentle ode to the pleasures of floating on a raft, as filtered through Huck’s evocative understatement.
“Why, a man’s safe in the hands of ten-thousand of your kind—as long as it’s day-time and you’re not behind him.”
The colonel’s words are a rebuke of the mob mentality, and especially of the antebellum tendency in the South to resort to vigilante lynching. Though in this instance the mob intends to hang a prominent and well-defended White colonel, the history of lynching in the South is mostly remembered as a method of cowardly White supremacist violence against Black people.
“All Kings is mostly rapscallions, as fur as I can make out.”
It takes very little to convince Jim and Huck that the two scoundrels on their raft are really a king and a duke, and just as little to convince them that those same claims are false. At a time when Europe’s crowned heads were in increasing disarray, this skepticism was due as much to the title as to the claim itself.
“He was thinking about his wife and his children, away up yonder, and he was low and homesick; because he hadn’t ever been away from home before in his life; and I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks does for there’n.”
Huck has been carefully painted as limited in his perspective and code up until this forceful epiphany, which acts as a turning point in the book. Twain’s contemporaries had opportunities to read about the plight of slavery’s victims from a polemical rhetorical standpoint many times, but Huck’s limitations make this empathetic breakthrough more universal and poignant.
“The girls said they hadn’t ever dreamed of seeing the family separated or sold away from the town. I can’t ever get it out of my memory, the sight of them poor miserable girls and n***** hanging around each other’s necks and crying.”
This is a moment of clarity for the daughters of the Wilks family and a crucial turning point for Huck. The girls “hadn’t ever dreamed” that the family who served them and made their lives comfortable were also contingent and chained to a cruel economic system. The king and the duke transform themselves from circumstantial navigators of this system to its cruelest and least thoughtful masters.
“I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write that n*****’s owners and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie—and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie—I found that out.”
In Huck’s complex reading of the present situation, he cannot escape the feeling that “stealing” Jim from his “rightful” owners is a disgraceful act and that succumbing to his natural affection for Jim is an act of vice similar to his love of tobacco. Twain’s readers would have appreciated the irony, if not the legal case, of Huck’s framing of this predicament.
“All right then, I’ll go to hell.”
In Huck’s materialist view of the world, a concept like hell holds little sway. Nevertheless, he does take the Christian teachings of adults like Miss Watson seriously enough to interrogate them throughout the book, and he understands that the consequences of his actions are real and worth facing.
“Why, drat it, Huck, it’s the stupidest arrangement I ever see. You got to invent all the difficulties.”
In the last quarter of the novel, the other characters take a back seat to Tom Sawyer, as Tom invents romantic dungeon terrors pulled from books like The Count of Monte Cristo. Though this must have seemed amusing to Twain’s contemporary readers, modern readers invested in Jim’s story are inclined to interpret Tom’s behavior as thoughtless and cruel.
“I couldn’t ever understand, before, until that minute and that talk, how he could help a body set a n***** free, with his bringing up.”
Huck forgives himself for working to free Jim, as he considers himself uncivilized; as for Tom, his “bringing up” excluded such behavior, to Huck’s way of thinking. Such ironic inversions are scattered throughout Twain’s book, giving a clue as to the “moral” he forbids us at the outset from looking at too directly.
“But I figure 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.”
In the novel’s final line, Huck declares his desire to travel west; prophetically so, as he says he will go “ahead of the rest.” In the 1840s places like Illinois were still considered part of the western wilds. By the time Twain wrote his book, that frontier had been pushed to the western coast.
By Mark Twain