Archive: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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Plot Summary
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn opens by familiarizing us with the events of the novel that preceded it, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Both novels are set in the town of St. Petersburg, Missouri, which lies on the banks of the Mississippi River. At the end of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, a poor boy with a drunken bum for a father, and his friend Tom Sawyer, a middle-class boy with an imagination too active for his own good, found a robber’s stash of gold. As a result of his adventure, Huck gained quite a bit of money, which the bank held for him in trust. Huck was adopted by the Widow Douglas, a kind but stifling woman who lives with her sister, the self-righteous Miss Watson.

As Huckleberry Finn opens, Huck is none too thrilled with his new life of cleanliness, manners, church, and school. However, he sticks it out at the bequest of Tom Sawyer, who tells him that in order to take part in Tom’s new “robbers’ gang,” Huck must stay “respectable.” All is well and good until Huck’s brutish, drunken father, Pap, reappears in town and demands Huck’s money. The local judge, Judge Thatcher, and the Widow try to get legal custody of Huck, but another well-intentioned new judge in town believes in the rights of Huck’s natural father and even takes the old drunk into his own home in an attempt to reform him. This effort fails miserably, and Pap soon returns to his old ways. He hangs around town for several months, harassing his son, who in the meantime has learned to read and to tolerate the Widow’s attempts to improve him. Finally, outraged when the Widow Douglas warns him to stay away from her house, Pap 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. While they camp out on the island, a great storm causes the Mississippi to flood. Huck and Jim spy a log raft and a house floating past the island. They capture the raft and loot the house, finding in it the body of a man who has been shot. Jim refuses to let Huck see the dead man’s face.

Although the island is blissful, Huck and Jim are forced to leave after Huck learns from a woman onshore that her husband has seen smoke coming from the island and believes that Jim is hiding out there. Huck also learns that a reward has been offered for Jim’s capture. Huck and Jim start downriver on the raft, intending to leave it at the mouth of the Ohio River and proceed up that river by steamboat to the free states, where slavery is prohibited. Several days’ travel takes them past St. Louis, and they have a close encounter with a gang of robbers on a wrecked steamboat. They manage to escape with the robbers’ loot.

During a night of thick fog, Huck and Jim miss the mouth of the Ohio and encounter a group of men looking for escaped slaves. Huck has a brief moral crisis about concealing stolen “property”—Jim, after all, belongs to Miss Watson—but then lies to the men and tells them that his father is on the raft suffering from smallpox. Terrified of the disease, the men give Huck money and hurry away. Unable to backtrack to the mouth of the Ohio, Huck and Jim continue downriver. The next night, a steamboat slams into their raft, and Huck and Jim are separated.

Huck ends up in the home of the kindly Grangerfords, a family of Southern aristocrats locked in a bitter and silly feud with a neighboring clan, the Shepherdsons. The elopement of a Grangerford daughter with a Shepherdson son leads to a gun battle in which many in the families are killed. While Huck is caught up in the feud, Jim shows up with the repaired raft. Huck hurries to Jim’s hiding place, and they take off down the river.

A few days later, Huck and Jim rescue a pair of men who are being pursued by armed bandits. The men, clearly con artists, claim to be a displaced English duke and the long-lost heir to the French throne. Powerless to tell two white adults to leave, Huck and Jim continue down the river with the pair of “aristocrats.” The duke and the dauphin pull several scams in the small towns along the river. Coming into one town, they hear the story of a man, Peter Wilks, who has recently died and left much of his inheritance to his two brothers, who should be arriving from England any day. The duke and the dauphin enter the town pretending to be Wilks’s brothers. Wilks’s three nieces welcome the con men and quickly set about liquidating the estate. A few townspeople become skeptical, and Huck, who grows to admire the Wilks sisters, decides to thwart the scam. He steals the dead Peter Wilks’s gold from the duke and the dauphin but is forced to stash it in Wilks’s coffin. Huck then reveals all to the eldest Wilks sister, Mary Jane. Huck’s plan for exposing the duke and the dauphin is about to unfold when Wilks’s real brothers arrive from England. The angry townspeople hold both sets of Wilks claimants, and the duke and the dauphin just barely escape in the ensuing confusion. Fortunately for the sisters, the gold is found. Unfortunately for Huck and Jim, the duke and the dauphin make it back to the raft just as Huck and Jim are pushing off.

After a few more small scams, the duke and dauphin 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. At the house where Jim is a prisoner, a woman greets Huck excitedly and calls him “Tom.” As Huck 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 between the Phelps house and the steamboat dock, and Tom pretends to be his own younger brother, Sid.

Tom hatches a wild plan to free Jim, adding all sorts of unnecessary obstacles even though Jim is only lightly secured. 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.

Characters

 * Huckleberry Finn
 * Protagonist and narrator.He is also the child of the town drunk and has to care for himself.
 * Tom Sawyer
 * Huck's friend, he looks after Huck but the two are completely different.
 * Miss Watson
 * Miss Watson and her sister are very wealthy and they adopt Huck and raise him.
 * Jim
 * One of Miss Watson's slaves, he is very intelligent and mature.
 * Pap
 * the abusive drunk father of huckleberry finn

Analysis
This book is an amayzing read for anyone enjoying a funny/intense adventure that you can't put down as you read the book you take in the characters as if you were there in the book with them.

Themes
The seemingly “good” white people such as Miss Watson and Sally Phelps express no concern about the injustice of slavery or the cruelty of separating Jim from his family.
 * Racism and Slavery

Motifs
Huck's childhood is important because the way he was raised plays a big part in the way he acts and his mentality. Twain also frequently draws links between Huck’s youth and Jim’s status as a black man.
 * childhood

Symbols
It's a symbol of freedom for Huck and Jim. Jim is trying to get to the free states so he wont have to be a slave. Huck is trying to get free from his abusive father and start a new life.
 * The Mississippi River

Significant Quotes
"Tom told me what his plan was, and I see in a minute it was worth fifteen of mine for style, and would make Jim just as free a man as mine would, and maybe get us all killed besides. So I was satisfied, and said we would waltz in on it."

Allusions
The Bible: New Testament Bible Verse: Matthew 18:12-13 Original Source: What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray and gets lost, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountain and go in search of the one that is lost? And if it should be that he finds it, truly I say to you, he rejoices more over it than over the ninety-nine that did not get lost. – Matthew 18:12-13

Cite: The Holy Bible KJV. 1995.

Quote from Secondary Source: “The widow she cried over me, and called me a poor lost lamb, and she called me a lot of other names, too, but she never meant no harm by it”. (7)

Cite: Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1st Edition Media, 2009.

Insight/Effect: It shows Finn’s complete lack of knowledge with the Bible or anything religious. Taylor Back 14 13:06, 11 November 2011 (MST)

Adaptations
Film


 * Tom Sawyer (1917 silent) by Famous Players-Lasky; directed by William Desmond Taylor; starring Jack Pickford as Tom, Robert Gordon as Huck and Clara *Horton as Becky
 * Huck and Tom (1918 silent) by Famous Players-Lasky; directed by William Desmond Taylor; starring Jack Pickford as Tom, Robert Gordon as Huck and *Clara Horton as Becky
 * Huckleberry Finn (1920 silent) by Famous Players-Lasky; directed by William Desmond Taylor; starring Lewis Sargent as Huck, Gordon Griffith as Tom and Thelma Salter as Becky
 * Tom Sawyer (1930) by Paramount Pictures; directed by John Cromwell; starring Jackie Coogan as Tom, Junior Durkin as Huck and Mitzi Green as Becky
 * Huckleberry Finn (1931) by Paramount Pictures; directed by Norman Taurog; starring Jackie Coogan as Tom, Junior Durkin as Huck and Mitzi Green as Becky
 * The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (February 1938) by Selznick International Pictures; directed by Norman Taurog; starring Tommy Kelly as Tom, Jackie Moran as Huck and Ann Gillis as Becky
 * Tom Sawyer, Detective (December 1938) by Paramount Pictures; directed by Louis King; starring Billy Cook as Tom and Donald O'Connor as Huck [Becky Thatcher was absent from this feature]
 * The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1939) by MGM; directed by Richard Thorpe; starring Mickey Rooney as Huck [Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher were absent from this feature]
 * The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a 1954 film starring Thomas Mitchell and John Carradine produced by CBS ([3])
 * The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a 1960 film directed by Michael Curtiz, starring Eddie Hodges and Archie Moore
 * The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a 1968 animated television series for children
 * Hopelessly Lost, a 1972 Soviet film
 * Huckleberry Finn, a 1974 musical film
 * Huckleberry Finn, a 1975 ABC movie of the week with Ron Howard as Huck Finn
 * Huckleberry Finn, a 1976 Japanese anime with 26 episodes
 * Huckleberry Finn and His Friends, a 1979 television series starring Ian Tracey
 * The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(1981)(TV) Kurt Ida as Huckleberry Finn
 * Rascals and Robbers: The Secret Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn (1982) (TV) Anthony Michael Hall as Huck Finn
 * Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a 1985 television movie which was filmed in Maysville, Kentucky.
 * The Adventures of Con Sawyer and Hucklemary Finn, a 1985 ABC movie of the week with Drew Barrymore as Con Sawyer
 * The Adventures of Huck Finn, a 1993 film starring Elijah Wood and Courtney B. Vance
 * Huckleberry Finn Monogatari, a 1994 Japanese anime with 26 episodes
 * Tomato Sawyer and Huckleberry Larry's Big River Rescue, a VeggieTales parody of Huckleberry Finn created by Big Idea Productions with Larry the Cucumber as the titular character. (2008)

Reviews
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been given numerous reveiws up to 4 1/2 to 5 stars.