Twain stopped work on the book completely for about three years and went on to write The Prince and the Pauper instead. Huckleberry was cordially hated and dreaded by all the mothers of the town, because he was idle and lawless and vulgar and bad—and because all their children admired him so, and delighted in his forbidden society, and wished they dared to be like him.
Tom was like the rest of the respectable boys, in that he envied Huckleberry his gaudy outcast condition, and was under strict orders not to play with him. So he played with him every time he got a chance…. Huckleberry came and went, at his own free will. He slept on doorsteps in fine weather and in empty hogsheads in wet; he did not have to go to school or to church, or call any being master or obey anybody; he could go fishing or swimming when and where he chose, and stay as long as it suited him; nobody forbade him to fight; he could sit up as late as he pleased; he was always the first boy that went barefoot in the spring and the last to resume leather in the fall; he never had to wash, nor put on clean clothes; he could swear wonderfully.
In a word, everything that goes to make life precious that boy had. So thought every harassed, hampered, respectable boy in St. Unlike Tom, who needs his community in order to rebel against it, Huck is completely outside it. He is entirely free of any social conventions.
He had to eat with a knife and fork; he had to use napkin, cup, and plate; he had to learn his book, he had to go to church; he had to talk so properly that speech was become insipid in his mouth; whithersoever he turned, the bars and shackles of civilization shut him in and bound him hand and foot. Worst, his father has turned up and is harassing him for money, to the extent that he kidnaps Huck and keeps him locked in an isolated cabin. After some initial misgivings about helping an escaped slave, Huck follows his heart and throws in with Jim after the first of many darkly symbolic scenes showing the different ways that the locals perceive white and black fugitives.
Huck is taken to be a runaway apprentice and is given sympathy and the offer of help by the same family who are planning to hunt Jim down with dogs for the reward. Although a much more complex novel than Tom Sawyer , the story of Huckleberry Finn is deceptively simple.
Petersburg in Chapter Three. During their journey, Huck and Jim have many close calls and adventures. Similarly, the novel is presented as autobiography by Huck — the opening lines establish it as such — and a serious cultural retrieval by Twain.
He is particularly interested in linguistic verisimilitude, adding an explanatory note that:. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech. I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.
The concluding point shows Twain the literary craftsman heading off criticism in advance because it is an unwritten law in fiction that accents are best described, never phonetically realised.
Yet Twain pulls it off, as Joyce later did in Ulysses , by understanding the music of the spoken word and its regional idioms. In Huckleberry Finn , Twain cuts the mooring line with the English and European literary traditions that continued to exert a huge influence on his relatively new country by writing a novel using entirely American voices, locations, traditions and experiences.
Pretty soon it darkened up, and begun to thunder and lighten; so the birds was right about it. Directly it begun to rain, and it rained like all fury, too, and I never see the wind blow so. It was one of these regular summer storms. In American high schools and colleges, Huck Finn is taught as an important, if controversial, book about race. For some, it is an inspiring story about how blacks and whites work together to find freedom.
For others, its use of racial slurs and stereotypes make it unteachable, if not unreadable. If Huck Finn was a book about race, however, few in the nineteenth-century seemed to know it.
Most contemporary reviews of the book ignored race entirely. No black newspaper -- and there were dozens in the U. If anything, Huck Finn is a sly, conflicted fable about how the country often moves sideways, even backwards, on racial equality. For modern readers concerned about inequality in arrest and incarceration rates, prison labor practices, and the retraction of civil rights for ex-prisoners, the last third of Huck Finn is a painful reminder that such patterns have been features of the justice system since the Civil War.
In truth, it's not exactly a book at all. The Huck Finn we know is actually just the surviving vestige of a multimedia project, a century ahead of its time, and absolutely groundbreaking: "a new kind of entertainment," The Washington Post wrote.
Akin to modern movie releases, Twain planned to release a "game" for children alongside Huck Finn. And he invented what might be regarded as the modern book tour to promote it. Or the modern rock tour, as he and author George Washington Cable traveled as the "Twins of Genius," and alongside readings from their books performed songs and stories they took from African-American sources, and performed with such Elvis-like verve that young women "blushed" and "fainted.
You can still see bits and pieces of these performances in the book: humor sketches written in homage to the minstrel shows of Twain's youth that point to modern banter comedy; music scenes where working class whites "pat juba" or dance "breakdowns" -- 19th-century equivalents of white hip-hop performers like Macklemore and Lewis or Iggy Azalea, both stealing and paying homage to black culture.
And if it is a book, it wasn't meant for the classroom. If you could tell Twain that his book would sell over 20 million copies in the 20th century, he'd probably be delighted. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. In both novels, Huck is a riposte to our complacency. Our attitude to a neglected child, torn between his sound instinct to help an enslaved man escape to freedom and the society that tells him he will go to hell for doing so tells us a lot about ourselves.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was first banned, directly upon its publication, because Huck was a bad example to young people. Click here for more information. Now it is banned to protect them from being offended, or confused. Even if his language is hard for contemporary teenagers to penetrate, they get Huck.
They understand keeping secrets. They understand that your friends expect you to protect them even if it gets you in trouble. They understand that their moral instincts are not always shared by society.
They understand that the worlds they create, either modern subcultures or a raft on the Mississippi, are more real and intelligible to themselves than the hypocrisy and corruption of adult society. They know that they will need to light out to the territories themselves someday.
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