Huckleberry Finn

Front 1

Huckleberry Finn

Back 1

The protagonist and narrator of the novel. Huck is the thirteen-year-old son of the town drunk. After escaping from his abusive father, Huck spends most of the novel traveling down the Mississippi River with Jim, an escaped slave. Though he is uneducated, Huck survives by relying on his wits. He is thoughtful, intelligent, and willing to come to his own conclusions about important matters, even when these conclusions contradict society’s norms. Nevertheless, Huck is still a boy, and is influenced by others, particularly by his friend, Tom

Front 2

Tom Sawyer

Back 2

Huck’s imaginative, dominating friend who comes from a relatively comfortable family. In contrast to Huck’s self-reliant and independent nature, Tom believes in sticking closely to the “rules” he has gleaned from society and the wild notions he reads about in adventure novels. Unfortunately these rules have more to do with style than with morality or anyone’s welfare. As a result, the schemes that he compels Huck and Jim to follow are unnecessarily complicated and often dangerous

Front 3

Jim

Back 3

One of Miss Watson’s household slaves who, after running away, becomes Huck’s companion and protector on the river. Jim is superstitious and sentimental, but he is also intelligent, practical, and ultimately more mature than the other characters in the novel. Jim’s frequent acts of selflessness, his longing for his family, and his friendship with both Huck and Tom demonstrate to Huck that humanity has nothing to do with race. Because Jim is a black man and a runaway slave, he is at the mercy of almost all the other characters in the novel and is often forced into ridiculous and degrading situations

Front 4

Widow Douglas& Miss Watson

Back 4

Two wealthy sisters who live together in a large house in St. Petersburg, Missouri. They adopt Huck and attempt to civilize him. Miss Watson is gaunt and severe. She is strict when it comes to teaching Huck about religion and manners. The Widow Douglas is somewhat gentler in her beliefs and has more patience with Huck. When Huck acts in a manner contrary to societal expectations, it is the Widow Douglas whom he fears disappointing.

Front 5

The duke and the dauphin

Back 5

A pair of con men whom Huck and Jim rescue as they are being run out of a river town. The older man, who appears to be about seventy, claims to be the “dauphin,” the son of King Louis XVI and heir to the French throne. The younger man, who is about thirty, claims to be the usurped Duke of Bridgewater. Although Huck quickly realizes the men are frauds, he and Jim remain at their mercy, as Huck is only a child and Jim is a runaway slave. The duke and the dauphin carry out a number of increasingly disturbing swindles as they travel down the river on the raft

Front 6

Judge Thatcher

Back 6

The local judge who shares responsibility for Huck with the Widow Douglas and is in charge of safeguarding the money that Huck and Tom found at the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. When Huck discovers that Pap has returned to town, he wisely signs his fortune over to the Judge, who doesn’t really accept the money, but tries to comfort Huck.

Front 7

The Grangerfords

Back 7

A family that takes Huck in after a steamboat hits his raft, separating him from Jim. The kindhearted Grangerfords are locked in a long-standing feud with another local family, the Shepherdsons, though no one remembers exactly what started it. Ultimately, the families’ sensationalized feud gets many of them killed.

Front 8

The Wilks family

Back 8

A family that the duke and the dauphin con after learning of the death of a local man named Peter Wilks, who has left behind a rich estate. The two con men pose as Wilks’s two brothers from England, the recipients of much of the inheritance. The duke and the dauphin’s subsequent conning of the good-hearted and vulnerable Wilks sisters is the first step in the con men’s increasingly cruel series of scams, which culminate in the sale of Jim.

Front 9

Silas and Sally Phelps

Back 9

Tom Sawyer’s aunt and uncle, whom Huck coincidentally encounters in his search for Jim after the con men have sold him. Sally is the sister of Tom’s aunt, Polly. Essentially good people, the Phelpses nevertheless hold Jim in custody and try to return him to his owner. Silas and Sally are the unknowing victims of many of Tom and Huck’s “preparations” as they try to free Jim

Front 10

SPARK NOTES

Back 10

These chapters establish Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer as foils for each other—characters whose actions and traits contrast each other in a way that gives us a better understanding of both of their characters. Twain uses Tom to satirize romantic literature and to comment on the darker side of so-called civilized society. Tom insists that his make-believe adventures be conducted “by the book.” As Tom himself admits in regard to his gang’s oath, he gets many of his ideas from fiction. In particular, Tom tries to emulate the romantic—that is, unrealistic, sensationalized, and sentimentalized—novels, mostly imported from Europe, that achieved enormous popularity in nineteenth-century America. Tom is identified with this romantic genre throughout the novel. Whereas Tom puts great stock in literary models, Huck is as skeptical of these as he is of religion. In both realms, Huck refuses to accept much on faith. He rejects both genies and prayers when they fail to produce the promised results. Twain makes this contrast between Tom’s romanticism and Huck’s skepticism to show that both points of view can prove equally misleading if taken to extremes.

Although Huck and Tom are set up as foils for one another, they still share some traits, which help to sustain their friendship throughout the novel. Perhaps most important, the two share a rambunctious boyishness; they delight in the dirty language and pranks that the adult world condemns. Yet Huck’s feelings about society and the adult world are based on his negative experiences—most notably with his abusive father—and ring with a seriousness and weight that Tom’s fancies lack. We get the sense that Tom can afford to accept the nonsense of society and romantic literature, but Huck cannot. On the whole, Huck’s alienation from the “civilization” of the adult world is a bit starker and sadder.

Ironically, the novel that Tom explicitly mentions as a model for his actions is Cervantes’s Don Quixote. In his masterpiece, Cervantes satirizes romantic adventure stories as Twain does in Huckleberry Finn. In referencing Don Quixote, Twain also gives a literary tip of the hat to one of the earliest and greatest picaresque novels, which, through its naïve protagonist’s wacky adventures, satirizes literature, society, and human nature in much the same way that Twain does in Huckleberry Finn. By means of the reference to Don Quixote, Twain tells us that, though he intends to write a humorous novel, Huckleberry Finn also fits into a longstanding tradition of novels that seek to criticize through humor, to point out absurdity through absurdity. In this chapter, for instance, Twain comments on Tom’s absurdity and blind ignorance in basing his actions on a novel that is so clearly a satire. Tom, who is interested in contracts, codes of conduct, fancy language, and make-believe ideas, believes in these frilly ideas at the expense of common sense. He cares more about absurd stylistic ideals than he does about people. Tom also displays some of the hypocrisy of civilized society. For instance, he makes the members of his gang sign an oath in blood and swear not to divulge the group’s secrets, but when a boy threatens to betray that promise, Tom simply offers him a bribe.

Front 11

SPARK NOTES

Back 11

In these chapters, Twain makes a number of comments on the society of his time and its attempts at reform. We see a number of well-meaning individuals who engage in foolish, even cruel behavior. The new judge in town refuses to give custody of Huck to Judge Thatcher and the Widow, despite Pap’s history of neglect and abuse. This poorly informed decision not only makes us question the wisdom and morality of these public figures but also resonates with the plight of slaves in Southern society at the time. The new judge in town returns Huck to Pap because he privileges Pap’s “rights” over Huck’s welfare—just as slaves, because they were considered property, were regularly returned to their legal owners, no matter how badly these owners abused them. Twain also takes the opportunity to mock the bleeding-heart do-gooders of the temperance, or anti-alcohol, movement: the judge is clearly naïve, misguided, and blind to the larger evils around him, and the weeping and moralizing that goes on in his home is grating, to say the least.

Throughout these chapters, Huck is at the center of countless failures and breakdowns in the society around him, yet he maintains his characteristic resilience. Indeed, Huck’s family, the legal system, and the community all fail to protect him or to provide a set of beliefs and values that are consistent and satisfying to him. Huck’s wrongful imprisonment elicits sympathy and concern on our part, even though this imprisonment does not seem to distress Huck in the least. Sadly, Huck is so used to social abuses by this point in his life that he has no reason to prefer one set of abuses over the other. Likewise, although Pap is a hideous, hateful man in nearly every respect, Huck does not immediately abandon him when given the chance. Pap is, after all, Huck’s father, and Huck is still a fairly young boy. Ultimately, Pap’s kidnapping of Huck provides an opportunity for Huck to break from this society that has done him harm.

Pap, the embodiment of pure evil, is one of Twain’s most memorable characters. Because we have no background information to explain his present state, his role is primarily symbolic. The deathly pallor of his skin, which is nauseating to Huck, makes Pap emblematic of whiteness. Unfortunately, Pap represents the worst of white society: he is illiterate, ignorant, violent, and profoundly racist. The mixed-race man who visits the town contrasts Pap in every way: he is a clean-cut, knowledgeable, and seemingly politically conscious professor. In establishing the contrast between Pap and the mixed-race man, Twain overturns traditional symbolism of his time and implies that whiteness, not blackness, is associated with evil. Jim’s vision of Pap’s two angels and Huck’s two future wives extends this sense of confusion over good and bad, human and inhuman, right and wrong in Huck’s world. At this point, Jim is unclear as to which will win, and even less clear about which should win.