34 - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Norton, 1998

416 pages

Date completed: June 11, 2010

I managed to avoid reading Huckleberry Finn all throughout high school by switching between advanced English classes and regular English classes. I'd tried reading it on my own, but just couldn't get into it. All these years later, I have finally plodded through the entire novel...but I was far from impressed.

The novel started off engaging and interesting; however, I soon found myself growing weary of the episodic plot. It seems as though Twain had no idea what he wanted to write about or where the plot was going, and so he just meandered from episode to episode until he reached a solid plot point: Huck encountering Jim on the island, which begins their journey together.

I felt a lot for some of these characters-- Huck, for example, is worse than orphaned. His abusive father, Pap Finn, is an alcoholic slimeball who shows up in Huck's life only when it is convenient: in this case, because he finds out that Huck acquired a lot of money at the end of Tom Sawyer. And if there is one type of character Twain knows how to write, it's definitely the horrible white person. Twain characterizes Pap with such disgusting precision that his appearances on the pages of this novel are actually startling.

On the other hand, I felt like the plot dragged and snagged far too often. The side stories were too frequent and long; the chapters about Huck's time with the duke and the king were particularly painful to sludge through.

One thing I cannot forgive Twain for, however, is sacrificing Jim's story for Huck's. Jim, a runaway slave, relies on Huck to help him escape from his mistress. However, rather than simply crossing the Mississippi River into the safe territory of Missouri, Twain writes an entirely different story for Jim. Instead of traveling north, Huck and Jim miss the mouth of the Missouri River and continue south on the Mississippi-- straight into the deep South. In fact, they travel straight toward the heart of slave country. Although Huckleberry Finn is often hailed as a breakthrough anti-slavery novel, I just can't see it that way. Twain sacrifices Jim's freedom in order to remain in his own familiar territory (Twain was a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River prior to his writing career)-- the Mississippi and the South. Although Jim does acquire his freedom in the end, I find Twain's means of bestowing that freedom upon Jim skewed at best.