A NOTE ON THE SPOILERS
A while ago I got a comment tantrum from a semiliterate rando because apparently some people are too stupid to understand a SPOILER WARNING, so I thought I’d elaborate on my exact definition of a spoiler. I AM GOING TO SUMMARIZE THE ENTIRE BOOK, INCLUDING THE ENDING. Think of me as a very niche Wikipedia. If you have a problem with that, you are welcome to stop reading at any time. I don’t make money from this content. I don’t care how many people read it.
This is your legacy, Fedup: an extra line on an obscure book blog that probably doesn’t even have ten followers. It’s not exactly a Nobel prize, but it’s still quite a nifty little achievement. Your parents must be so proud. Please seek help.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers. Other reviews in this series can be found here.
POV: You think you were supposed to read this in ninth grade during the same unit that included To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee), only you don’t remember a goddamn thing about it and that’s making you think you didn’t actually read it because you were just the worst and you probably got by on scrapings from class discussions. Not that that doesn’t describe my approach to every class, but this one is particularly grating because I am certain that I was supposed to read Huck Finn but also just as certain that I never did, and that only became apparent as a problem twenty years later, when I decided I wanted to read James (Percival Everett). In full transparency, you don’t need Huck Finn to appreciate James, but I am a nerd as well as a terrible student and I insist on reading the inspiration before I get to the thing I actually want to read in almost every instance. So here I am, and here you are, and I’m about to tell you all about Huck Finn a couple decades after I was supposed to have read him. I really do come late to every party.
Narrated in the Pike County dialect by Huckleberry “Huck” Finn himself – in stark contrast to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which is narrated in third-person drawing room English – the book starts in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, Missouri. When last we left them, Huck and Tom were two wild boys who stumbled into great wealth at $6,000 apiece. That gold is now under the management of Judge Thatcher, who has arranged for the boys to have an interest rate of a dollar a day, and Huck has been adopted by the well-meaning Widow Douglas. The good widow’s civilization-related efforts are supported by her sister, Miss Watson, and between the two of them they try to teach Huck manners and religion and all sorts of nonsense, but they fail magnificently. With only the barest supervision, Huck continues to run around with Tom and his gang, engaging in every kind of roguish shenanigan from forming a robber band whose membership is sealed with blood to playing pranks on Jim, Miss Watson’s gentle-hearted slave. Nevertheless, the ladies carry on valiantly until the day Huck is abducted by his abusive father (“pap”) and spirited away to a remote cabin.
Though not overly fond of pap, Huck finds that their general lifestyle suits him far better than proper clothes and Bible memorization, and they roll along well enough for a time. Unfortunately, pap has a drinking problem and a violent temper, and, after a frightening episode, Huck fakes his own death, thereby managing to escape both pap and the widow. By and by he runs into Jim, who ran away after overhearing plans to sell him, and the pair of them set off down the Mississippi River on a raft, heading for the relative safety of Illinois. Hiding by day and traveling by night, they make their way from town to town and actually do quite well for themselves for a while. It’s not that they don’t run into problems – at one point they accidentally overhear an almost-murder, at another Huck lands in the middle of a Capulet/Montague-style feud that ends in wholesale slaughter when a daughter of one family elopes with a son of the other – but for the most part life is fine, though Huck begins to feel he was wrong to help Jim escape his so-called rightful owner.
This idyllic lifestyle, which heretofore had consisted of eating, talking, and sleeping, comes to an abrupt end when Huck makes the mistake of picking up a pair of grifters who claim to be a king and a duke. He runs into them while they’re on the run from an angry mob (whose anger becomes clearer over time), and they promptly thank him for his kind assistance by turning him and Jim into slaves to soothe their own egos. Though initially placated by the money they make with a performance they call the Royal Nonesuch, which butchers a number of classical works, the shameless self-styled royals become dissatisfied after they lose all their money in a botched inheritance fraud scheme. They therefore sell Jim to the farmer Silas Phelps in the town of Pikesville and try to augment their earnings with another Royal Nonesuch, but the locals, alerted to the scam by Jim, tar and feather the pair before running them out of town on a rail.
Meanwhile, Huck is giddy with relief at Jim’s apprehension and comes thisclose to turning Jim in to what he considers the proper authority – i.e., the widow Douglas, who he believes is still Jim’s owner – until he realizes that Jim has been both a friend and a surrogate father to him. Unable to send him back to slavery, Huck tears up the note he had written to the widow and determines to free Jim, though he firmly believes that doing so will condemn him to Hell. Thus, he sneaks onto the Phelps family’s farm but gets caught by Sally, wife of Silas, who mistakes him for her nephew. By sheer happenstance, Sally turns out to be Tom Sawyer’s maternal aunt and she actually was expecting a visit from Tom, so Huck quickly passes into a very awkward social situation that is not relieved by the appearance of the actual Tom. However, he manages to intercept Tom before he can ruin everything; and Tom, being naturally mischief-inclined, agrees not only to introduce himself to Aunt Sally (who has never seen him in person) as his half-brother Sid, but also to help Huck free Jim.
Here again Huck’s indoctrinated conscience raises its head and tries to warn Tom that stealing a slave is a serious crime, but Tom blows off his objections and sets his mind to the task of rescuing Jim, which would be a fairly straightforward process if Tom weren’t hell-bent on making it as dramatic an escape as possible. Overriding Huck’s far more sensible plans, Tom immediately comes up with a weeks-long plot that requires Jim to keep a prison diary, carve strange messages into the walls of his hut, and eat a rope ladder that the boys smuggle to him in a pie. (The ever-patient Jim humors them. He doesn’t have much of a choice.) While Jim is busy with Tom’s idiotic demands, the boys dig a tunnel that ends up under Jim’s bed, but Tom decides to complicate matters further omg I will destroy him by writing an anonymous note warning the Phelpses that bad shit is about to go down. The Phelpses respond by alerting the entire town, and their neighbors all show up armed to the teeth, intending to keep Jim from escaping. Somehow the boys manage to get Jim out of the hut and down to the raft, but Tom is accidentally shot in the leg during the hunt that follows and I wish I could be sorrier but I can’t say he didn’t have it coming.
Anyway, Tom is badly injured (obviously, he just got shot in the leg), so Huck ignores his protests and runs for a doctor. Jim sacrifices his own freedom helping the doctor nurse Tom back to health and is rewarded with recapture because no good deed goes unpunished. Luckily, Tom wakes up and finally tells his family that the widow passed away some time ago, and that she freed Jim in her will. Jim has thus been a free man for a considerable period of time, but endured an extended captivity for no other purpose than Tom’s own personal entertainment. As a sort of compensation, Tom gives Jim forty dollars. After learning that pap has also died, Huck wraps up his story plotting to flee west to Native American territory before Aunt Sally can adopt him, and swearing that he will never write another book because of all the trouble it gave him.
“We really should’ve got more of Jim” is what I would be saying if Percival Everett hadn’t already beat me to it. I really cannot wait to see what Everett’s Jim makes of Tom’s insane playacting, and I hope it contains some arrangement of “What is wrong with this idiot?” Because literally, what the hell is wrong with this little shit??? In the beginning I thought he was a psychopath, but then I found out that the whole robber gang thing was just a game and it never went anywhere so I figured it was just him being a little boy, but then he showed up again and made Jim go through an unspeakably stupid prison-breaking ruse just for the vibes while knowing the whole time that Jim was free but choosing not to let on what he knew, and now we’re back to the psychopath theory. I hate this kid. I hate him with a passion unrivaled. My impression of him has not been improved in any way by The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, because at the time of writing (January) I am about 67% of the way through that book and I’m not having a good time. (ALSO: Tom claims at the beginning of Huck Finn that he doesn’t know what a ransom is despite having defined the term for Huck at the end of Tom Sawyer, I mean, tell me you didn’t reread your own book without telling me you didn’t reread your own book.)
I actually do like Huck, who is far more sensible (and sensitive) than Tom, and it helps a lot that we’re in his head for the entire book. He’s rough around the edges and he can sometimes go too far with his own pranks, but he has a good heart and mostly does what he feels is right, even when it goes against his own indoctrination. I struggled a bit in the beginning with the dialect in which the book is written, but once I’d got the hang of it I was fine. I prefer this style of narration to the style in which Tom Sawyer is narrated because it has an earthier, more genuine feel to it, where Tom Sawyer is written in such a self-consciously literate manner that the whole book feels deeply contrived. I can see why Huckleberry Finn is the one that gets taught in the classrooms, or at least in mine, even though it’s the second in the series (in addition to which Tom Sawyer so far has not offered any insights into pre-Civil War racial issues).
That being said: I have looked briefly into literary criticism regarding this book just to make sure I wasn’t crazy, and, while I understand that it was intended as a social critique, it doesn’t really read like one to me. On the one hand, it is a satirically unflattering portrayal of the American South. Pap and the king and the duke are presented as cruel and ill-intentioned, thoughtless, selfish, greedy, unable to control their baser instincts. I was exceedingly pleased when those royal shits got themselves tarred and feathered, and I wish they’d done it sooner. Tom is not ill-intentioned, but he is deeply selfish and careless of other people; even the kinder-hearted Huck doesn’t get off scot-free, as he makes it clear that Jim is beneath him for reasons he likely can’t fully articulate. The residents of the towns along the river frequently treat each other with a viciousness that makes me glad I’m not on that raft with Huck and Jim, and the king and the duke turn Huck into their personal butler while treating Jim as a liquid asset. At its core, the novel is about the escape of two slaves – Huck from pap, Jim from the widow – whose escapes are treated very differently by the people around them, and if I hold my breath and squint I can sort of see it.
The problem is that I don’t think Twain quite succeeded in pulling apart Huck’s Southern indoctrination when it remains baked into him until the bitter end. It doesn’t come across as a genuine critique because Huck never really does learn to see Jim as an actual human being. Even when he chooses to go against societal expectations, it’s always with an undercurrent of superiority and fear: superiority because he still sees Jim as property until he learns that the widow freed him in her will; fear because he has been taught since birth that a crime such as slave-poaching will send him straight to Hell. The moment in which he makes the conscious decision to be “bad” isn’t the moment I wanted it to be, because I wanted it to be the moment Huck realized that Jim was a person and that, in deliberately freeing him from an institution that is objectively bad, he was in fact doing good. I would have liked to have seen more of an epiphany around Jim’s humanity: Huck still seems surprised that Jim has feelings, and has to be reminded of that fact after a particularly mean-spirited prank. Here again, he does the right thing and apologizes to Jim, but he also acknowledges to us, the reader, that he finds it almost impossible to humble himself to a man who is not white.
Now that I’m thinking about it, I kind of wish Jim had been closer to Huck’s age, a brother figure rather than a father figure, because it might have drawn a sharper point in the comparison of their respective situations. Huck’s escape is lauded as he flees an abusive parent; Jim’s escape is condemned as he flees an abusive system. People want to adopt Huck as their own son, while Jim is forced to hide during the day to avoid recapture. But because Jim is an adult, the point is muted: of course people want to adopt Huck, he is a literal child; of course they’re not jumping to adopt Jim. The discrepancy between their experiences would have been more clearly delineated if they had been the same age, if Huck had been lovingly folded into however many families while Jim was left out in the cold, alone and in fear of his life. I would have felt better if Huck had then learned something from observing Jim’s experience as compared to his own.
When Tom showed up – and before I got started on Tom Sawyer, so I didn’t know a lot about him – I was hoping he would be the catalyst in Huck’s growth, because to be perfectly frank I don’t expect Jim to go around deprogramming white kids. That is absolutely not his job. I was so sure that Tom would present an alternative viewpoint for Huck to mull over, namely that freeing a slave is neither a crime nor a mortal sin, which would then lead Huck to realize that JIM IS A HUMAN BEING, but that didn’t happen. What Tom actually does is incredibly disappointing, even – or especially – when he confesses that Jim has been free for a while. The farcical prison-breaking sequence wasn’t as funny as Twain intended it to be when I had no idea that Jim was already free, and Tom himself was so infuriatingly careless in a matter that meant literal life or death for Jim, so stubbornly insistent on making that prison-break as idiotically complicated as he could, that I was ready to string him up by his ankles long before the tunnel was dug. Given the satirical bent of the book, I presume this was the point, but that doesn’t make it any more pleasant to read, especially when Tom’s thoughtless shenanigans are treated with an affectionate nostalgia in Tom Sawyer.
In summary, Huck would’ve been more than justified in shoving Tom into a box and then freeing Jim the sensible way, and I would’ve been happy to help him. While I don’t hate the book and even enjoyed much of it, I would’ve been far happier if Tom had just kept himself to himself and stayed back in St. Petersburg. I can see Twain’s intentions, but this doesn’t count in his favor when I had to look to others to explain what exactly those intentions were. Still, I don’t regret reading the book and I saw enough of Jim to be excited for James, which was the whole point of this exercise, so all in all I suppose I can’t complain.
