Book: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Posted on November 4th, 2009 in Books, Education, Entertainment, Life, Politics and Law | 5 Comments »
This post is a part of The Great American Novel Challenge. If you’re interested in taking part in the challenge, feel free to jump right in next month.
I’m almost embarrassed to include Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (there is no ‘The’ in the title) in my list simply because doing so is an admission that I hadn’t read it before. Then again, reading great books that we probably should have read by now is partly purpose of the Great American Novel Challenge. Make no mistake about it: Mark Twain‘s Huck Finn is a genuinely great American novel.
I should start this review where Mark Twain started his book. The first page contains this notice:
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.
By the Order of the Author,
Per G. G., Chief of Ordinance
In some ways this notice tells you all you need to know about Mark Twain. It’s humorous, yet half-serious. It sets the reader up to find their own inner Huck Finn because if you do any of these things, then you’re breaking the established rules of the book. Of course, if you don’t see a motive, moral, or plot in the book, then why read it at all?
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn picks up where The Adventures of Tom Sawyer left off. It was conceived as a sequel, but it stands alone. Readers don’t have to have read Tom Sawyer prior to reading Huck Finn. In fact, Mark Twain struggled for eight years to write and publish Huck Finn and the books are considerably different from one another. The preface to my edition of the book explains that Huck Finn comes at the midpoint of his career and “stands on a line between the upbeat humor of the early books and the bitterness of the later ones.” I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this statement, but I can say that Huck Finn delicately balances humorous storytelling with serious social commentary.
The book is ostensibly the story of a young boy’s adventures on the Mississippi river narrated after the fact by the boy himself. The story starts with Huck Finn in his hometown being raised by a widow and her sister. They try to civilize him, but Huck Finn doesn’t particularly like the idea of being forced to do things in a ‘civilized’ way. Eventually, Huck’s abusive father manages to bring Huck back to his place where Huck escapes, fakes his own death, and begins life floating down the Mississippi. While on the river, he meets up with Jim, a runaway slave previously owned by the widow and her sister.
The middle of the book is largely episodic. Each episode can be demarcated by the return to the tranquility and safety of floating down the river on a raft. These episodes are mini-commentaries on a particular part of American culture. For example, there’s an episode in which Huck and Jim run into a gang trying to steal from a wrecked riverboat. Another episode involves a family feud similar to the archetypal Hatfield-McCoy feud. Yet another episode details the exploits of two grown con men as they ply their trade. The episodes serve as satires of the many ways that we become slaves to society. We become slaves to the desire to get rich quick. We become slaves to our deep-seated animosities. We become slaves to unthinking religion. Twain is calling for us to think for ourselves, act as individuals, and take action appropriately.
The over-arching plot of the book is the fate of Jim, the runaway slave. Huck Finn’s individualism and friendship for Jim battle with his upbringing and society’s expectations for him as he decides whether or not he will actively help Jim escape to freedom. It’s worth noting how Huck dismisses inaction as complicity in the predictable result and unworthy of himself. This in and of itself is a commentary on the society in which Huck Finn finds himself. Throughout the book Huck views civilization as something akin to a brainwashed malaise that everyone has accepted. Perhaps this is why his relationship with Jim and the actions he takes as a result of it are so important.
The ending of the book and the resolution of the main plot is bittersweet, which seems almost inevitable because of the book’s structure. There’s simply no river left to for Huck to escape to. Huck and Jim are both freer as runaways than they ever were before the story began or after it comes to an end. The strength of the book is the middle rather than the ending, and I won’t comment further on the ending simply to ensure that I won’t ruin it for anyone who hasn’t read the book.
Twain’s home-spun style starting with the NOTICE on the first page and continuing throughout the book was particularly comforting for me because I have so many fond memories of visiting my extended family in North Carolina as a boy. They all spoke with strange accents and expressions that seemed so magical to me having been raised in the midwest. There was comfort, humor, and seriousness in those conversations that seemed unguarded and real. That’s what reading this book felt like to me, but I suspect that everyone will find some “southern comfort” in Twain’s story telling.
Twain is famous for walking that thin line between sly humor and moral outrage even to those who have not read his books. His dry wit and incisively worded commentary remain relevant for any free society because he is constantly reminding us that freedom and individual liberty aren’t achieved so much as they are maintained. If we aren’t vigilant in analyzing for ourselves the outcomes of our action or inaction, then we will become slaves to something. Twain points this out so masterfully and with such unique style in Huck Finn that I am forced to conclude that Huck Finn is the most American of the books I’ve read for this challenge thus far.
Five books down; eight to go!
My books in the challenge thus far are:
July 2009: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
August 2009: Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)
September 2009: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929)
October 2009: For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (1940)
November 2009: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884)
5 Responses
I read this in high school, but I don’t remember liking it very much. I’m glad you liked it and I can see how it has been the most ‘American” of the books you’ve read so far. I look forward to you posts every month – can’t wait to hear about what you read next month!
Others have told me they didn’t really like Huck Finn when they were required to read it either. The book is definitely opinionated and direct as a result of the open first-person narrative voice Twain uses. I can see how that would rub some folks the wrong way. Do you remember why you didn’t really like the book when you read it in high school?
Woe to those high school students that are required to read serious literature! (I remember when I read — albeit, at my own initiative — Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye; to this day I still remember thinking when I finished it that I Just Didn’t Get It.) My American Lit. professor said that it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, and I agree. I believe that if high school students ARE to be exposed to such works, then they should be spoon fed the critical analysis. That means they should be explicitly told what values were implicit to that generation and the author in question. It’s no wonder that the above posters didn’t care for Huck Finn; they were probably told to read it and given no literary criticism to complement it.
Huck Finn is easily one of the most misunderstood Great American Novels because so many people think of it as a children’s story. This is a VERY understandable mistake since:
1. It is a sequel to a bona fide children’s story — albeit at a novel’s length; and
2. It ACTUALLY BEGINS as a children’s story.
It is generally considered by most literary critics that Clemens didn’t know where to take the story; and, after removing Huck and Jim (and it should be noted that Huck never actually refers to Jim as “NIgger Jim”) from the Mississippi, that he had set the story aside for a number of years. During this time he had an occasion to travel throughout the South; and what he saw disturbed him. He pulled Huck Finn out from storage and it is from this point onward that the novel demonstrates its greatness; for Clemens will no longer seek to entertain children, but — rather — expose the Southern Condition. In order to do this, he will have his protagonists explore the region; it will be the first American road trip, and the road traveled by them will be that great wide highway known by its denizens simply as “The River”. First they have to get back to the river, however, and in doing so Clemens lets the reader know that this is no longer a children’s story by invoking The Bard (specifically, “Romeo & Juliet”).
The chapters that follow are a veritable catalog of all of the deficiencies of Southern culture (and by the way, it definitively shows through the characterization of Jim just why Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” must be considered propaganda — albeit, very good propaganda); and at the end Clemens has Huck following Horace Greeley’s dictum: “Go west, young man.” Clemens might have added that there was no future to be had in the South; sentiments that would be repeated some 40 years later by a certain young writer in Mississippi by the name of William Falkner. Through the various lives of his Snopes family Faulkner would unfailingly draw a comparison between the post-Civil War and the South of the first-half of the 20th Century; and his message was an obvious one: Go to great industrial cities of the North, for there is no future to be had here in the South.
From Clemens to Faulkner the conclusion is obvious: The more things change, the more they stay the same.
You’re absolutely right about assigning literature to high school students! So many people that I have talked to about this challenge either hate the books they read in high school or freely admit that they didn’t get them. It’s rather uncommon that people hold up a book they read in high school as life-changing.
In addition, several people that I’ve talked to about the Great American Novel Challenge happily discuss one or two ‘classics’ they read or re-read years after graduating from high school. Their experiences are much, much better.
I love the idea of thinking of Huck Finn as a road trip. The entire latter half of the book feels so episodic, and thinking of it as a road trip is a wonderful analogy.
Although I mostly agree with your comments, I feel like there’s an element of hope missing. I didn’t leave Huck Finn feeling quite as down as I did after The Sound and the Fury. There’s hope in the way Huck himself changes in the book.
Thanks for the comment!
“I feel like there’s an element of hope missing. I didn’t leave Huck Finn feeling quite as down as I did after The Sound and the Fury. There’s hope in the way Huck himself changes in the book.”
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Yes, but the very act of growing and changing makes it impossible for Huck — much in the same way as it did for Clemens — to abide by the strictures of Southern Culture. By leaving Tom Sawyer behind (not just literally, but metaphorically as well since Tom now represents Huck’s now-forever-gone childhood), Huck is not just living the adage that you can never go home again, he is leaving behind the culture and values that causes — to paraphrase Lois McMaster Bujold — the South to eat its young. “Hope”, you say? There was none to be had in the South by staying; it could only be acquired through the act of leaving.
This Wikipedia entry ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Mississippi_Flood_of_1927#Political.2C_sociological_and_cultural_effects ) sums it up well — albeit, in a different context: “The aftermath of the flood was one factor in the Great Migration of African-Americans to northern cities. Previously, the move from the rural South to the Northern cities had virtually stopped. In June 1927 the flood waters began to recede, however the interracial relations were too strained to withstand. Hostilities had ruptured between the races; a black man was shot by a white police officer simply because he didn’t want to work a double shift. As a result of displacement lasting up to six months, tens of thousands of local African-Americans moved to the big cities of the North, particularly Chicago, many thousands more followed in the following decades.”