Chapter 19; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
June 25th, 2015
This book counts 366 pages and was first published in 1884 in the UK and a year later in the US. It played mainly along the Mississippi River into a pre-civil war society that already 20 years ceased to exist by the time the book was published. It was often criticized for the use of the colorful slang language of that time. Especially the common use of the term “nigger” to describe an Afro-American drew suspicions that Twain was a racist although the main protagonists in his books and their story-lines are quite the opposite.
Summary
The narrator in this particular book is Huckleberry Finn, 13 or 14 years old, who came after his adventures with Tom Sawyer, his best friend, into considerable wealth and was placed under the guardianship of the widow Douglas, assisted by her sister Miss Watson in an effort of the local authorities of St. Petersburg (a fictive town in Missouri) to civilize him.
Miss Watson had an easygoing well-mannered slave named Jim, but when Jim overheard a conversation between his owner and a slave trader were his mistress was offered considerable amount of money to sell him to a plantation down the river, he decided to elope and hid upon an island a little bit down the river.
Meanwhile, Huck’s father, an incorrigible drunken tramp, got wind of his son’s fortune and abducted him in an effort to put his hands upon the money. Finally Huck managed to escape by making everybody believe that he was murdered and soon joined Jim on Jackson’s Island. Jim’s plan was to escape to Cairo, a town down the river in Illinois where slavery was abolished and to acquire enough money to buy his wife and two children free.
They got around in Huck’s canoe, but after a heavy flood they found a raft and a house drifting on the river. They decided to keep the raft and to search the house for useful and valuable items. Inside the house they stumbled upon the naked body of a brutally murdered man, but Jim forbade Huck to look at the corpse.
After that Huckleberry dressed up as a girl in order to sneak into town and to gather some information. There he had a meeting with the perspicuous Mrs. Judith Loftus, who very soon found out that he wasn’t a girl but nevertheless told him that Jim was suspected to have murdered him and that a reward of 300 dollar had triggered a manhunt.
She also mentioned that around midnight the search party to which her husband belonged would search Jackson Island because some people saw signs of a campfire there. After that Huck hastily returned to the island and both of them loaded swiftly their belongings upon the raft and took off.
At a certain moment during their eventful travel, their raft got hit by a steamship and they got separated. Huck found refuge by the Grangerfords, a wealthy Kentucky family who possessed large estates and had a blood feud with the equally wealthy Sheperdsons. Huck befriended the youngest member of the family, a boy of his age named Buck. However the vendetta escalated when Buck’s older sister ran off with a male member from the Shepherdson family. In the ensuing fight, all the male members of the Grangerford family, including Buck, got killed. A slave that belonged to the Grangerford household, led Huck to the swamps where to his big relief he got reunited with Jim who was secretly supported by the slaves belonging to the Grangerford estate and who used his time in hiding to recover and repair the raft.
During their travel further downstream, they took two con artists on the run on board who would be referred to as to as the king and the duke. They were constantly putting together schemes to trick unsuspicious country side people out of their money.
To Huckleberry Finn’s opinion they crossed a line when they were trying to trick three young girls out of their heritage by posing as estranged relatives. Huck hid the money that they stole into the coffin of the girl’s benefactor but then they buried the man before he could retrieve it.
The girl’s real relatives arrived and all three of them got apprehended. In a discussion about a tattoo on the deceased man’s chest, they exhumed his body and found the disappeared money. Into the following turmoil they could escape and went a way down the river in an effort to create some distance.
The two crooks ended up penniless into a small town, where during Huck’s absence they sold Jim to a local plantation owner who gave them a 30 dollar reward, hoping that he would cash in on Jim’s still outstanding warrant of 300 dollar.
Very soon Huck found out that Jim was held at the plantation of Silas and Sally Phelps, and he decided at once to liberate Jim. Without any plan of action in mind he went to the plantation and is welcomed as a relative. It appeared that they were expecting a nephew; the son of Sally Phelps sister, a boy named Tom Sawyer.
When Huck retraced his way to town he intercepted the real Tom Sawyer and Tom decided to pose as his younger half-brother Sid. Tom, who was always a little of a fantast with a Don Quixote-like vision upon reality, convinced Huck to go to an elaborate hoax to set Jim free.
When their plan was about to succeed, Tom suffered a bullet wound and Jim got out of the woods where he was hiding to assist the doctor to hold Tom while the doctor removed the bullet out of Tom’s leg but the doctor nevertheless returned him to the Phelps plantation as a prisoner.
Shortly after, Tom’s Aunt Polly arrived and revealed their true identities. She also told that Jim’s mistress, who died two weeks earlier, out of remorse for considering selling him to a plantation owner, had set him free into her testament.
Huck is still unwilling to return to St. Petersburg, fearing that he would again be abducted by his abusive father, but then Jim revealed that the dead man that they found into the house drifting on the river was his father. The story ended with Sally planning to adopt Huck, but Huck intended to escape west wards, into the Indian Territories.
Comments;
The best comment on this book has been delivered by the writer himself into his lecture notes; “…a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat”
The Maharajagar 