50 pages • 1 hour read
Mark TwainThe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1884A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Illusion and Costumery
When in public, Huck spends less time as himself than he does under an assumed identity. By necessity, Jim must always stay hidden or assume a different identity for fear of capture, enslavement, or death. On the margins, morality must remain malleable and slippery, and so too must identity. Huck is never adept at this alteration of identity; early on Judith tells him he makes a terrible girl, and his attempts to be an English servant are laughed at by anyone with the slightest knowledge of English custom. Yet Huck understands the value of maintaining such illusions, even poor ones, at important junctures. When it comes time for him to tell the truth to Mary Ann, the young girl he’s allowed the duke and the king (through their own barely functional illusions) to nearly swindle her out of her inheritance, he understands that her lack of experience in cunning will get them all in trouble. He sends her away rather than bear a truth her expression is likely to reveal. In Miss Watson’s idea of heaven, it may be that everyone tells the truth and no one ever misrepresents themselves. In Huck’s world, however, a different reality—several different realities—holds true.
The River
Rather than a plot, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has a river. Huck and Jim’s story follows the river’s natural course south, and they are arrested and guided in turns by weather and tumultuous currents toward an unknown destination.
The book is set in a time and place recalled from Mark Twain’s own youth growing up in the riverfront town of Hannibal, Missouri. Twain’s apprenticeship provided experience with working on a steamship and with the idiosyncrasies of the Mississippi River. This is a knowledge Huck shares with his creator. When Huck first escapes from his father by canoe, he says, “I shot past the head at a ripping rate, the current was so swift, and then I got into the dead water and landed on the side towards the Illinois shore” (43). With such knowledge at hand, Huck becomes an excellent waterman, faltering only when he lands on shore, where circuitous stories teach him parables about human nature but take him and Jim no further to their destination. Huck reflects that “there warn’t no home like a raft, after all,” judging that the “cramped up and smothery” experience of land pales in comparison to the “mighty free and comfortable” raft and river (120).
Dialect
There is no narrative break from dialect in Huckleberry Finn. The story is told entirely from Huck’s perspective, with asides from other speakers with other dialects of the American Midwest and Southern traditions. Unlike The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, there is no soothing and normalizing third-person narrative mediator to guide us through the novel. This was unusual enough that Twain felt he should include a preface in case the reader supposed “that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding” (3). Being among the first and boldest books to immerse the reader in such dialect, Huckleberry Finn opened the door for many other books written using the rhythms and cadences taken from life, including writers as diverse as Zora Neale Hurston, Damon Runyon, and Roddy Doyle. Besides adding to the book’s immersive quality, such dialect enriches the text’s bedrock ironies, making them more believable. Huck Finn is not simply “going west,” he’s “got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest” (292).
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By Mark Twain
