Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Summary

Huckleberry Finn tells his own story in the speech of a half-schooled Missouri boy, some forty or fifty years before the book appeared. After the treasure found at the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the Widow Douglas has taken Huck in to civilize him, while her sister Miss Watson drills him in manners and spelling. His drunken father, Pap, returns to claim Huck's money, kidnaps him, and locks him in a cabin across the river, where Pap suffers a night of delirium tremens and chases his son with a knife. Huck escapes by faking his own murder with a pig's blood and hides on Jackson's Island. There he finds Jim, Miss Watson's slave, who has run away because she meant to sell him down the river to New Orleans. The two set off on a raft, hoping to reach Cairo, Illinois, and take a steamboat up the Ohio to the free states. They board a wrecked steamboat, the Walter Scott, and escape a gang of robbers; they are separated in a fog, and Huck's cruel joke on Jim afterward ends in a humble apology. They drift past Cairo in the night, and a steamboat smashes the raft. Huck washes ashore among the Grangerfords, a genteel Kentucky family locked in a feud with the Shepherdsons, and watches his friend Buck shot in the river. Reunited with Jim, he welcomes two swindlers onto the raft, who call themselves the Duke of Bridgewater and the lost Dauphin of France. They stage the Royal Nonesuch, work a camp-meeting, and pose as the English brothers of the dead Peter Wilks to seize his daughters' inheritance, until Huck hides the gold in the coffin and the real brothers arrive. Finally the king sells Jim for forty dollars. Alone, Huck struggles with his conscience, writes a letter to Miss Watson to tell where Jim is, and then tears it up, choosing to steal Jim out of slavery even if it means hell. At the Phelps farm he is mistaken for Tom Sawyer, Aunt Sally's nephew, and the real Tom arrives and takes the name of his brother Sid. Tom turns the rescue into a long romance of escape drawn from his adventure books. In the breakout Tom is shot in the leg, and Jim gives up his own freedom to stay with the doctor and nurse him. Tom then reveals that Miss Watson died two months earlier and freed Jim in her will; Jim tells Huck that the dead man in the floating house was Pap. Huck ends planning to light out for the Territory. Chatto and Windus published the book in London on 10 December 1884, and Charles L. Webster and Company in New York on 18 February 1885, with illustrations by E. W. Kemble.

Top Lessons

• A conscience trained wrong

  Huck has been taught by church and town that helping a runaway is theft and sin, and his conscience accuses him for it. His friendship with Jim pulls against those lessons, and in Chapter XXXI he chooses Jim while still believing he is choosing damnation. Twain lets the reader see what Huck cannot: that his heart is right and his teaching wrong.

• Jim's dignity on the raft

  After the fog in Chapter XV, Huck tries to convince Jim it was all a dream, and Jim's grieved answer shames him into apologizing. On the raft Jim stands Huck's watches, shelters him, and speaks of his own wife and children. The friendship grows out of shared danger and is tested by Huck's habits of thought.

• The river and the shore

  The raft is the place of freedom and honesty, and nearly every stop on shore shows people at their worst or most foolish: the feud, the shooting of Boggs, the lynch mob, the gulled crowds of the Royal Nonesuch, the greed around the Wilks coffin. Twain's satire falls on the respectable and the swindlers alike.

• Romance against reality

  Tom Sawyer runs his life by adventure books, and his scheme to free Jim in the style of famous prisoners turns a simple rescue into a cruel game. Huck admires Tom but sees more truly. The ending asks how much of Tom's romance remains in the world around him.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Pap Finn's attack of delirium tremens in Chapter VI is one of the most vivid literary scenes of alcohol withdrawal in nineteenth-century American fiction: he sees snakes, cries that the dead are coming for him, and chases Huck as the Angel of Death. Huck reports it without medical vocabulary, which is part of its force; Pap's earlier sham temperance reform under the new judge, ending in a drunken night and a broken arm, is a comic study of relapse. The river world is full of irregular medicine. The duke dabbles in patent medicines, mesmerism and phrenology, and the king claims laying on of hands for cancer and paralysis; Jim treats a rattlesnake bite with Pap's whiskey and folk remedies, and the hairball oracle and snakeskin omens show the superstitions that sat beside them. Huck turns away slave hunters in Chapter XVI by letting them think his family has smallpox, a fear grounded in the epidemics of the river towns. Dr. Robinson, who exposes the king's fraud at the Wilks funeral, and the country doctor who treats Tom's gunshot wound and praises Jim's nursing, are the book's two honest physicians. Emmeline Grangerford's obituary verses satirize the period's cult of mourning.

• Chapter V

  Pap swears off drink before the new judge, who weeps over his reform; that night he gets drunk, rolls off the porch roof and breaks his arm.

• Chapter VI

  Pap's delirium tremens in the cabin: visions of snakes, terror of the dead, and his chase of Huck with a clasp-knife.

• Chapter X

  Jim is bitten by a rattlesnake, drinks Pap's whiskey as a remedy and ties the snake's rattles to his wrist; Huck blames handling the snakeskin.

• Chapter XVI

  Huck lets slave hunters believe his father on the raft has smallpox, and they keep their distance and give him money.

• Chapter XVII

  Huck describes the dead Emmeline Grangerford's mourning pictures and obituary poems.

• Chapter XIX

  The duke and the king list their trades, including patent medicines, mesmerism, phrenology and faith healing.

• Chapters XXV-XXIX

  Dr. Robinson denounces the king as a fraud at the Wilks house and later helps test the claimants.

• Chapters XL-XLII

  Tom is shot in the calf during the escape; the doctor treats him and testifies that Jim stayed to help nurse him at the risk of his freedom.