SUMMARIES

Summary
Summary
Mark Twain blends many comic elements into the story of Huck Finn, a boy about 13 years
old, living in pre-Civil War Missouri. Huck, the novel’s narrator, has been living with the
Widow Douglas and her sister, Miss Watson, in the town of St. Petersburg. They have been
trying to “sivilize” him with proper dress, manners, and religious piety. He finds this life
constraining and false and would rather live free and wild. When his father hears that Huck
has come into a large amount of money, he kidnaps him and locks him in an old cabin across
the river. To avoid his father’s cruel beatings, Huck elaborately stages his own death and then
escapes to Jackson’s Island. He finds Jim, Miss Watson’s runaway slave, on the island, and
the two decide to hide out together. To avoid danger of discovery, they decide to float down
the river on a raft they had found earlier. Sleeping during the day and traveling at night, they
plan to connect with the Ohio River at Cairo, Illinois, which would lead them north into the
free states, where slavery is outlawed. They miss Cairo in the fog one night and find
themselves floating deeper into slave territory. While they are searching for a canoe, a
steamship hits the raft and damages it. Huck and Jim are separated.

Huck swims ashore where he meets the feuding Grangerfords and Shepherdsons. He claims
to be George Jackson, a passenger who fell from a steamboat and swam to shore. After
witnessing a violent eruption of the feud in which many people are killed, he finds Jim, and
they return to the raft.

They continue down the river. Two conmen, calling themselves a king and a duke, find their
way to the raft. In one of the towns the king and the duke impersonate the two brothers of
Peter Wilks, who has just died and left a small fortune. Huck thwarts their plan to swindle
Wilks’ family out of their inheritance. The king and the duke escape, but further down the
river the two decide to sell Jim to Silas Phelps, who turns out to be Tom Sawyer’s uncle.

Visiting his aunt and uncle, Tom persuades Huck to join him in an elaborate, ridiculous plan
to free Jim. Huck prefers a quicker escape for Jim but caves in to Tom’s wishes. Only after
Tom’s plan has been played out, and Jim recaptured, does Tom reveal that Miss Watson had
actually freed Jim two months earlier, just before she died. Huck decides to “light out for the
 Territory,” to head west toward the frontier before anyone can attempt to “sivilize” him
again.

Estimated Reading Time

The reading of the novel is slowed somewhat by an unfamiliarity with Twain’s use of
regional dialects and nonstandard English. After the first few chapters, a familiarity with the
unique speech of each of the characters should, however, speed the reading process. The
reader should be able to finish the novel in approximately 12 hours.

Summary
(CRITICAL SURVEY OF LITERATURE FOR STUDENTS)

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Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer had found a box of gold in a robber’s cave. Later, after
Judge Thatcher takes the money and invests it for the boys, each receives the huge allowance
of one dollar a day. The Widow Douglas and her sister, Miss Watson, take Huck home with
them to try to reform him. At first, Huck cannot stand living in a tidy house where smoking
and swearing are forbidden. Worse, he has to go to school and learn how to read. He does,
however, manage to drag himself to school almost every day, except for the times when he
sneaks off for a smoke in the woods or goes fishing on the Mississippi River.

Life is beginning to become bearable to him when one day he notices a boot print in the
snow. Examining it closely, he realizes that it belongs to his worthless father, whom he has
not seen for more than a year. Knowing that his father will be looking for him when he learns
about the money, Huck rushes to Judge Thatcher and persuades him to take the fortune for
himself. The judge is puzzled, but he signs some papers, and Huck is satisfied that he no
longer has any money for his father to take from him.
Huck’s father shows up one night in Huck’s room at the Widow Douglas’s home.
Complaining that he has been cheated out of his son’s money, the old drunkard later takes
Huck away with him to a cabin in the Illinois woods, where he keeps the boy a prisoner,
beating him periodically and half starving him. Huck is allowed to smoke and swear,
however, and before long he begins to wonder why he ever liked living with the widow. His
life with his father would be pleasant except for the beatings. One day, he sneaks away,
leaving a bloody trail from a pig he kills in the woods. Huck wants everyone to believe he is
dead. He climbs into a canoe and goes to Jackson’s Island to hide until the excitement
subsides.

After three days of freedom, Huck wanders to another part of the island, and there he
discovers Jim, Miss Watson’s black slave, who tells Huck that he ran off because he
overheard Miss Watson planning to sell him down South for eight hundred dollars. Huck
swears he will not report Jim. The two stay on the island many days, Jim giving Huck an
education in primitive superstition. One night, Huck paddles back to the mainland. Disguised
as a girl, he calls on a home near the shore. There he learns that his father disappeared shortly
after the people of the town concluded that Huck was murdered. Since Jim disappeared just
after Huck’s apparent death, there is now a three-hundred-dollar reward posted for Jim’s
capture, for most people believe that he killed Huck.

Knowing that Jackson’s Island will soon be searched, Huck hurries back to Jim, and the two
head down the Mississippi on a raft they have found. They plan to sell the raft at Cairo,
Illinois, and then go on a steamboat up the Ohio River into free territory. Jim tells Huck that
he will work hard in the North and then buy his wife and children from their masters in the
South. Helping a runaway slave bothers Huck’s conscience, but he reasons that it would
bother him more if he betrayed a good friend. One night, as they are drifting down the river
on their raft, a large steamboat looms before them, and Huck and Jim, knowing that the raft
will be smashed under the hull of the ship, jump into the water. Huck swims safely to shore,
but Jim disappears.

Huck finds a home with a friendly family named Grangerford, who are feuding with the
nearby Shepherdson family. The Grangerfords treat Huck kindly and leave him mostly to
himself, even giving him a young slave to wait on him. One day, the slave asks him to come
to the woods to see some snakes. Following the boy, Huck comes across Jim, who has been
hiding in the woods waiting for an opportunity to send for Huck. Jim repairs the broken raft.
That night, one of the Grangerford daughters elopes with a young Shepherdson, and the feud
breaks out once more. Huck and Jim run away after the shooting begins and set off down the
river.

Shortly afterward, Jim and Huck meet two men who pretend they are European royalty and
make all sorts of nonsensical demands on Huck and Jim. Huck is not taken in, but he reasons
that it would do no harm to humor the two men to prevent quarreling. The so-called Duke and
King are clever schemers. In one of the small river towns, they stage a fake show, which lasts
long enough to net them a few hundred dollars. On the third night, just before the scheduled
third show, they run off before the angered townspeople can catch them.

From a talkative young man, the King learns about the death of Peter Wilks, who has left
considerable property and some cash to his three daughters. Wilks’s two brothers, whom no
one in the town ever saw, are living in England. The King and the Duke go to the three
nieces, Mary Jane, Susan, and Joanna, and present themselves as the two English uncles.
They take all the inheritance, put up the property for auction, and sell the slaves. This high-
handed deed causes great grief to the girls, and Huck cannot bear to see them so unhappy. He
decides to expose the two frauds, but he wants to ensure Jim’s safety first. Jim is hiding in the
woods waiting for his companions to return to him. Employing an ingenious series of lies,
subterfuges, and maneuverings, Huck exposes the Duke and King. Huck flees back to Jim,
and the two escape on their raft. Just as Jim and Huck think they are on their way and well rid
of their former companions, the Duke and King come rowing down the river toward them.

The whole party sets out again, with the Duke and the King planning to continue their
schemes to hoodwink people in the towns along the river. In one town, the King turns Jim in
for a reward, and he is sold. Huck has quite a tussle with his conscience. He knows that he
ought to help return a slave to the rightful owner, yet on the other hand he thinks of all the
fine times he and Jim had together and how loyal a friend Jim is. Finally, Huck decides that
he will help Jim to escape.

Learning that Silas Phelps is holding Jim, he heads for the Phelps farm. Mrs. Phelps runs up
and hugs him, mistaking him for the nephew whom she is expecting to come for a visit. Huck
wonders how he can keep Mrs. Phelps from learning that he is not her nephew. Then to his
relief, he learns she has mistaken him for Tom Sawyer. Huck rather likes being Tom for a
 while, and he is able to tell the Phelpses about Tom’s Aunt Polly and Sid and Mary, Tom’s
half-brother and cousin. Huck is feeling proud of himself for keeping up the deception. Tom
Sawyer, when he arrives, tells his aunt that he is Sid.

At the first opportunity, Huck tells Tom about Jim’s capture. To Huck’s surprise, Tom offers
to help him set Jim free. Huck cannot believe that Tom will be a slave stealer, but he keeps
his feelings to himself. Huck intends merely to wait until there is a dark night and then break
the padlock on the door of the shack where Jim is kept; but Tom says the rescue has to be
done according to the books and lays out a highly complicated plan. It takes a full three
weeks of plotting, stealing, and deceit to get Jim out of the shack. The scheme results in a
chase, however, in which Tom is shot in the leg. After Jim is recaptured, Tom is brought back
to Aunt Sally’s house to recover from his wound. There, he reveals the fact that Miss Watson
died, giving Jim his freedom in her will. Huck is greatly relieved to learn that Tom is not
really a slave stealer after all.

When Tom’s Aunt Polly arrives unexpectedly, she quickly sets straight the identities of the
two boys. Jim is given his freedom, and Tom gives him forty dollars. Tom tells Huck that his
money is still safely in the hands of Judge Thatcher, and when Huck moans that his father
will likely be back to claim it again, Jim tells Huck that his father is dead; Jim observed him
lying in a derelict house they saw floating in the river. Huck is ready to start out again
because Aunt Sally says she might adopt him and try to civilize him. Huck thinks that he
cannot go through such a trial again after the Widow Douglas’s attempts to civilize him.

Summary
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Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn had found a box of gold in a robber’s cave. After Judge
Thatcher had taken the money and invested it for the boys, each had the huge allowance of a
dollar a day. The Widow Douglas and her sister, Miss Watson, had taken Huck home with
them to try to reform him. At first, Huck could not stand living in a tidy house where
smoking and swearing were forbidden. Worse, he had to go to school and learn how to read.
He did, however, manage to drag himself to school almost every day, except for the times
when he sneaked off for a smoke in the woods or to go fishing on the Mississippi River.

Life was beginning to become bearable to him when one day he noticed a boot print in the
snow. Examining it closely, he realized that it belonged to his worthless father, whom he had
not seen for more than a year. Knowing that his father would be looking for him when he
learned about the money, Huck rushed to Judge Thatcher and persuaded him to take the
fortune for himself. The judge was puzzled, but he signed some papers, and Huck was
satisfied that he no longer had any money for his father to take from him.

Huck’s father showed up one night in Huck’s room at Widow Douglas’ home. Complaining
that he had been cheated out of his money, the old drunkard later took Huck away with him
to a cabin in the Illinois woods, where he kept the boy a prisoner, beating him periodically
and half starving him. Huck was allowed to smoke and swear, however, and before long he
began to wonder why he had ever liked living with the widow. His life with his father would
have been pleasant if it had not been for the beatings. One day, he sneaked away, leaving a
bloody trail from a pig he had killed in the woods. Huck wanted everyone to believe he was
dead. He climbed into a canoe and went to Jackson’s Island to hide until all the excitement
had blown over.

After three days of freedom, Huck wandered to another part of the island, and there he
discovered Jim, Miss Watson’s black slave, who told Huck that he had run off because he had
overheard Miss Watson planning to sell him down south for eight hundred dollars. Huck
swore he would not report Jim. The two stayed on the island many days, Jim giving Huck an
education in primitive superstition. One night, Huck paddled back to the mainland. Disguised
as a girl, he called on a home near the shore. There he learned that his father had disappeared
shortly after the people of the town concluded that Huck had been murdered. Since Jim had
disappeared just after Huck’s apparent death, there was now a three-hundred-dollar reward
posted for Jim’s capture, for most people believed that he had killed Huck.
Knowing that Jackson’s Island would soon be searched, Huck hurried back to Jim, and the
two headed down the Mississippi on a raft. They planned to sell the raft at Cairo, Illinois, and
then go on a steamboat up the Ohio River into free territory. Jim told Huck that he would
work hard in the North and then buy his wife and children from their masters in the South.
Helping a runaway slave bothered Huck’s conscience, but he reasoned that it would bother
him more if he betrayed a good friend. One night, as they were drifting down the river on
their raft, a large steamboat loomed before them, and Huck and Jim, knowing that the raft
would be smashed under the hull of the ship, jumped into the water. Huck swam safely to
shore, but Jim disappeared.

Huck found a home with a friendly family named Grangerford, who were feuding with the
nearby Shepherdson family. The Grangerfords treated Huck kindly and left him mostly to
himself, even giving him a young slave to wait on him. One day, the slave asked him to come
to the woods to see some snakes. Following the boy, Huck came across Jim, who had been
hiding in the woods waiting for an opportunity to send for Huck. Jim had repaired the broken
raft. That night, one of the Grangerford daughters eloped with a young Shepherdson, and the
feud broke out once more. Huck and Jim ran away after the shooting and set off down the
river.

Shortly afterward, Jim and Huck met two men who pretended they were European royalty
and made all sorts of nonsensical demands on Huck and Jim. Huck was not taken in, but he
reasoned that it would do no harm to humor the two men to prevent quarreling. The Duke and
the King were clever schemers. In one of the small river towns, they staged a fake show,
which lasted long enough to net them a few hundred dollars. Then they ran off before the
angered townspeople could catch them.

From a talkative young man, the King learned about the death of Peter Wilks, who had left
considerable property and some cash to his three daughters. Wilks’s two brothers, whom no
one in the town had ever seen, were living in England. The King and the Duke went to the
three nieces, Mary Jane, Susan, and Joanna, and presented themselves as the two English
uncles. They took all of the inheritance and then put up the property for auction and sold the
slaves. This high-handed deed caused great grief to the girls, and Huck could not bear to see
them so unhappy. He decided to expose the two frauds, but he wanted to ensure Jim’s safety
first. Jim had been hiding in the woods waiting for his companions to return to him.
Employing an ingenious series of lies, subterfuges, and maneuverings, Huck exposed the
Duke and King. Huck fled back to Jim, and the two escaped on their raft. Just as Jim and
Huck thought they were on their way and well rid of their former companions, the Duke and
King came rowing down the river toward them.

The whole party set out again, with the Duke and the King planning to continue their
schemes to hoodwink people in the towns along the river. In one town, the King turned Jim in
for a reward, and he was sold. Huck had quite a tussle with his conscience. He knew that he
ought to help return a slave to the rightful owner, yet on the other hand he thought of all the
fine times he and Jim had had together and how loyal a friend Jim had been. Finally, Huck
decided that he would help Jim to escape.

Learning that Silas Phelps was holding Jim, he headed for the Phelps farm. Mrs. Phelps ran
up and hugged him, mistaking him for the nephew whom she had been expecting to come for
a visit. Huck wondered how he could keep Mrs. Phelps from learning that he was not her
nephew. Then to his relief, he learned they had mistaken him for Tom Sawyer. Huck rather
liked being Tom for a while, and he was able to tell the Phelps all about Tom’s Aunt Polly
and Sid and Mary, Tom’s brother and sister. Huck was feeling proud of himself for keeping
up the deception. Tom Sawyer, when he arrived, told his aunt that he was his own brother,
Sid.

At the first opportunity, Huck told Tom about Jim’s capture. To Huck’s surprise, Tom
offered to help him set Jim free. Huck could not believe that Tom would be a slave stealer,
but he kept his feelings to himself. Huck had intended merely to wait until there was a dark
night and then break the padlock on the door of the shack where Jim was kept; but Tom said
the rescue had to be done according to the books, and he laid out a highly complicated plan. It
took fully three weeks of plotting, stealing, and deceit to get Jim out of the shack. The
scheme resulted in a chase, however, in which Tom was shot in the leg. After Jim was
recaptured, Tom was brought back to Aunt Sally’s house to recover from his wound. There,
he revealed the fact that Miss Watson had died, giving Jim his freedom in her will. Huck was
greatly relieved to learn that Tom was not really a slave stealer after all.

When Tom’s Aunt Polly arrived unexpectedly, she quickly set straight the identities of the
two boys. Jim was given his freedom, and Tom gave him forty dollars. Tom told Huck that
his money was still safely in the hands of Judge Thatcher, and when Huck moaned that his
 father would likely be back to claim it again, Jim told Huck that his father was dead; Jim had
seen him lying in a derelict house they had seen floating in the river. Huck was ready to start
out again because Aunt Sally said she thought she might adopt him and try to civilize him.
Huck thought that he could not go through such a trial again after having tried to be civilized
once before under the care of Widow Douglas.

Summary
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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn may at first have seemed to Twain to be an obvious and easy
sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but this book, begun in the mid-1870 s, then
abandoned, then taken up again in 1880 and dropped again, was not ready to be published
until 1884. It was worth the delay. It proved to be Twain’s finest novel—not merely his finest
juvenile work but his best fiction, and a book that has taken its place as one of the greatest
novels written in the United States. In some ways it is a simpler novel than The Adventures of
Tom Sawyer; it has nothing like the complication of plot which made that earlier novel so
compelling.

Huck, harassed by the Widow Douglas and her sister, Miss Watson, who want to give him a
good home and a place in normal society, and by his brutal father, who wants to get his hands
on the money that Huck and Tom found in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, decides to get
away from it all, and he runs away. This time, he does not have the tempering influence of
Tom Sawyer, who was prepared to run away to a nearby island but could not resist going
home for his own funeral. Tom is only an occasional renegade, eager for the romance but not
the long-term reality of rebellion. Huck is of tougher stuff, and he intends to go for good. No
better indication of this is to be seen than in the simple fact that Tom tries to smoke but does
not have the stomach for it: Huck does not play at it. He is a real smoker and a real rebel—or
so he thinks.

Kidnapped by his father and held captive by him, Huck revels at least in the freedom of the
barbaric world without soap, water, or school, but he manages to get away, leaving a trail that
suggests he has been murdered, and heads for an island in the Mississippi as a start on his
attempt to get away from his father and from the well-meaning sisters who would turn him
into a respectable citizen. He is on his way to leave all of his troubles behind him.

It is at this point that Twain adds the complication that is to be central to the ascent of this
novel from juvenile fancy to the level of moral seriousness. Huck discovers that Jim, Miss
Watson’s Negro slave, has also run away, having overheard her plans to sell him to a
southern farmer. Jim, whose wife and children have already been separated from him and
sold to a southern owner, is determined to escape to the free northern states, work as a free
man, and eventually buy his family out of bondage. Huck is determined to help him, but he is
also unnerved by his concern for Jim’s owner. Jim is property before he is a man, and Huck is
deeply troubled, surprisingly, by the thought that he is going to help Jim. He sees it, in part,
as a robbery, but more interestingly, he sees his cooperation as a betrayal of his obligation to
the white society of which he is a member. Huck, the renegade, has, despite himself, deeply
ingrained commitments to the idea that white people are superior to black people, and for all
his disdain for that society, he is strongly wedded to it.

This conflict provides the psychological struggle for Huck throughout the novel. Even when
the two move on, driven by the news that in the town a reward has been posted for Jim,
accusing him of murdering Huck, Huck carries a strong sense of wrongdoing because he is
helping Jim to escape—not from the murder charge, which can be easily refuted, but from his
mistress, who clearly owns him and is entitled to do with him what she will.

Nevertheless, Huck and Jim set off on the raft, which is wedded archetypally to the Ulyssean
ship and may be seen as the vehicle for Huck to find out who he is and what kind of man he
is likely to become. The pattern is a common one in the history of fiction; Twain weds it to
another common structure, the picaresque, which has a long literary history and in which the
main characters, while traveling, encounter trials and tribulations that test their wits and
ultimately their moral fiber. Twain tends to open this pattern up to include examples of
human behavior that do not necessarily have any influence on Huck and Jim but rather
indicate Twain’s pessimism about human nature in general. The Grangerford-Shepherdson
feud, for example, shows the kind of virulent stupidity that can obsess even relatively
civilized human beings.

The confidence men who call themselves the Duke and the King, however, take over the raft
and use Huck and Jim (and anyone else they can deceive) for profit without concern of any
kind. They reveal a much deeper strain of human degradation, which anticipates the
inhumanity that is to become even more common in Twain’s later works. Huck fears these
men but is reluctant to make a clean break from them, though it is fair to remember that they
watch him and Jim very closely. The ultimate betrayal comes when Huck, who has let their
confidence games be played out in several communities, draws the line when they try to
defraud a family of three daughters of their inheritance. The Duke and the King escape
without discovering that Huck has revealed their plan. Undismayed by their loss, they start
their fraudulent games again, committing their most thoughtlessly cruel act by selling Jim for
the reward money.

This is the point of no return for Huck. Jim—ignorant, superstitious, and timid but loyal and
devoted to Huck—has, on the long trip down the river, shown over and over that he is a man
of considerable character, despite his color and despite his disadvantaged life as a slave.
Huck, in turn, discovers that however much he tries to distinguish Jim as other than an equal,
however much he is bothered by his determination to see Jim as a lesser being than the white
man, he cannot ignore his growing concern for him nor his deepening affection and respect
for the way in which Jim endures and goes on. Disgusted by the unfeeling barbarity of the
King and the Duke, Huck sets out to free Jim, believing that in so doing, he will go to Hell.

Here the novel returns to the less dangerous world of Tom Sawyer, as it turns out that Jim’s
new jailors are, in fact, Tom Sawyer’s aunt and uncle. Huck passes himself off as Tom in
order to get to Jim, who is being kept in a farm outhouse. With the arrival of Tom himself,
who passes himself off as his brother Sid, the fun begins, as Tom, as wildly romantic as ever,
plots to free Jim the hardest way possible. From this moment on, the novel can be said to fall
away from the power that has been explored in Huck’s battle to come to terms with his
loyalties to society, to his own race, and, most important, to Jim. That battle has been won
when Huck decides to save Jim.
 All works out well in the end. Tom reveals that a repentant Miss Watson freed Jim before she
died, and Aunt Sally, Tom’s aunt, thinks she might have a try at civilizing Huck. Huck has
other ideas. All this horseplay on the farm is irrelevant, if pleasingly so, to the real strength of
the novel, which lies in the journey down the mighty Mississippi, during which Huck Finn
learns to care for someone, and perhaps more important, throws off that least valuable
influence of society upon him: its belief that white people are superior to black people and
have a right to treat human beings as property. Huck, in a sense, comes to the end of this
novel as the most civilized white person of all.

Summary
(CRITICAL GUIDE TO CENSORSHIP AND LITERATURE)

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The story of a poor and uneducated boy from eastern Missouri, Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn is narrated by Huck himself. He relates his adventures as he travels down the
Mississippi River on a raft with a runaway slave named Jim. The book satirizes antebellum
Southern society and the constraints of civilization, which both Huck and Jim are attempting
to escape. Mark Twain’s use of dialects is one of the most original and influential aspects of
the novel, and in many ways sets it apart as a masterwork of American literature. However,
his use of dialect has also sparked controversy.

Almost immediately upon publication, the rough language Huck uses evoked calls for
excluding the book from libraries. As the Boston Transcript reported in March, 1885, that the
Concord, Massachusetts, public library committee “decided to exclude Mark Twain’s latest
book from the library. One member of the committee says that, while he does not wish to call
it immoral, he thinks it contains but little humor, and that of a very coarse type. He regards it
as the veriest trash.” Mark Twain responded that the calls for censorship would only help sell
more copies.
 Since the novel’s publication, it has been removed from libraries or schools in Denver (in
1902), New York City (1957), Winnetka, Illinois (1976), San Jose, California (1995), and
many other places. As late as the mid-1990’s efforts to remove it from classroom use failed in
Plano, Texas, and Tempe, Arizona. The civil liberties group People for the American Way
estimated that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the third most- challenged book in
America in 1996.

The most common reason for the controversy is the frequency with which Huck uses the
racial epithet “nigger” to describe Jim. Although Huck clearly evolves over the course of the
story in his appreciation of Jim as a friend, father figure, and human being (he even opts to
risk damnation for helping Jim seek freedom), many critics have pointed out that Huck often
portrays Jim as a shallow character with minstrel-like comic simplicity.

Late twentieth century debates have moved from the question of whether the book should be
taught to how and at what level it should be taught. Scholars have shown that Mark Twain
himself held sophisticated and enlightened views on race, slavery, and post-reconstruction
treatment of African Americans. Many scholars and teachers have advocated adding
historical context to the learning process, so that students are better prepared to decode the
language and grapple with the deeper moral and historical issues the book raises.

Summary
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Published by Gale Cengage

Chapters 1-7: Huck's Escape

Mark Twain begins The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with a notice to the reader. He
identifies Huckleberry Finn as "Tom Sawyer's Comrade" and reminds the reader that this
novel resumes where The Adventures of Tom Sawyer left off: in St. Petersburg, Missouri, on
the Mississippi River, "forty to fifty years" before the novel was written (so between 1834
and 1844, before the American Civil War). He tells the reader that several different "dialects
are used," which have been written "painstakingly," based on his own "personal familiarity
with these several forms of speech."

The novel's title character, Huckleberry Finn, narrates the story. He summarizes the end of
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, in which he and Tom discovered a large amount of stolen
gold. He lives now with the Widow Douglas, who has taken him in as "her son," and her
sister, Miss Watson. His father, "Pap," has disappeared:

Pap hadn't been seen for more than a year, and that was comfortable for me; I didn't want to
see him no more. He used to always whale me when he was sober and could get his hands on
me; though I used to take to the woods when he was around.

The widow attempts to "sivilize" Huck and teach him religion. Huck finds her ways
confining. Miss Watson nags him to learn to read, to "set up straight," and to behave. Huck
remains superstitious, and he mostly resists the women's influence; after bedtime, he escapes
out his window to join Tom Sawyer for new adventures. The boys meet Jim, "Miss Watson's
nigger," and they play a trick on him. Jim, like Huck, is superstitious, and when he wakes up
he thinks that witches played the trick.

Tom, Huck, and other boys meet in a cave down the river, and form a Gang, a "band of
robbers." But Huck tires of the Gang's adventures, because they are only imaginary. When
Pap shows up in St. Petersburg, he causes Huck some realproblems. Pap wants Huck's
reward money from the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Signs of his son's increased
civilization irritate him: the proper clothing, and the ability to read and write. Huck secures
his money by "selling" it to Judge Thatcher. Huck's father brings a lawsuit against the judge,
but "law" is "a slow business." Eventually Pap kidnaps Huck, and takes him up the river to a
shack on the Illinois side of the river. At first, Huck enjoys the return to freedom, but living
with his father has its difficulties; "by-and-by pap [gets] too handy with his hick'ry," and he
either leaves Huck locked in the cabin alone, or beats him. Huck decides to escape, and cuts a
hole in the cabin. After his father lays in some supplies, Huck lays his plans. He catches a
canoe as it floats down the river. Left alone, Huck stages his own murder: he kills a wild pig
and leaves its blood around the shack and on his jacket, then leaves a fake trail showing a
body being dragged to the river. He then loads up the supplies and takes off down river. He
stops to camp on Jackson's Island, two miles below St. Petersburg.

Chapters 8-18: Down the River

On the island, Huck feels liberated. Seeing his friends search for his body troubles him only
slightly. After a few days, he discovers that he is not alone on the island: Jim has run away
from Miss Watson, who had threatened to sell him down the river. Jim's escape troubles
Huck, but together they enjoy a good life: fishing, eating, smoking, and sleeping. They find a
house floating down the river, with a dead man in it, from which they take some valuables.
Huck appreciates the lore that Jim teaches him, but still likes to play tricks. He leaves a dead
rattlesnake on Jim's bed, and Jim gets bitten by the snake's mate. He recovers, but interprets
the bite as the result of Huck touching a snake-skin—a sure bringer of bad luck. Jim suspects
that there is more to come.

One night, Huck dresses as a girl and goes across to town to "get a stirring-up." He discovers
that there is a reward offered for Jim and that the island is no longer a safe hiding place. He
rushes back to the island, and he and Jim float down the Mississippi, sleeping by day and
drifting by night. Living this way, they get to know each other, and Jim tells Huck about his
children. They also have several adventures. They board a wrecked steamboat and steal some
ill-gotten goods from three thieves on board, inadvertently leaving them to drown.

Huck and Jim get separated in a fog. They call out, but for hours at a time, they seem lost to
each other. Huck falls asleep, and when he awakens, he sees the raft. He sneaks aboard and
convinces Jim it was all a dream. When Huck points to evidence of the night's adventure and
teases him for being gullible, Jim teaches Huck a lesson:

"When I got all wore out wid work, en wid de callin' for you, en went to sleep, my heart wuz
mos' broke bekase you waz los', en I didn' k'yer no mo' what become er me en de raf. En
when I wake up en fine you back ag'in, all safe en soun', de tears come, en I could 'a' got
down on my knees en kiss' yo' foot, I's so thankful. En all you wuz thinkin' 'bout wuz how
you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is trash, en trash is what people is
dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren's en makes 'em ashamed."
It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger; but
I done it, and I warn't ever sorry for it afterwards, neither I didn't do him no more mean
tricks, and I wouldn't done that one if I'd 'a' knowed it would make him feel that way.

Chapters 19-33: The King and Duke

Huck and Jim plan to drift down to Cairo, Illinois, and then steamboat North, but they realize
that they passed Cairo in the fog. A steamboat crashes into their raft and separates them
again. Huck swims ashore and is taken in by the Grangerford family, who are embroiled in a
feud with another local family, the Shepherdsons. He lives with the Grangerfords, while Jim
hides in a nearby swamp and repairs the raft. When the feud erupts into new violence, and
Huck's new friend, Buck Grangerford, is killed, Huck and Jim set off once again down the
river.

Huck and Jim rescue two "rapscallions," who identify themselves as a duke and a king. They
take the prime sleeping quarters on the raft and expect Jim and Huck to wait on them. They
employ different schemes to make money along the river. They attend a religious camp-
meeting, and the king takes up a collection for himself. In "Arkansaw," they rent a theater
and put on a Shakespearean farce called "The Royal Nonesuch." Next, a boy they meet
confides that an inheritance awaits one Mr. Wilks, an English gentleman, in his town. Seeing
their opportunity, the king and duke assume the identity of Mr. Wilks and his servant, and go
to claim the money. Huck feels increasingly uneasy about their unscrupulous behavior, and
vows to protect their victims. He hides the cash they try to steal. When the real Mr. Wilks
arrives, Huck and Jim try—but fail—to escape without the rascally "king" and "duke."

Next, the king and duke betray Jim as a runaway slave, and "sell" their "rights" to him to a
farmer, Silas Phelps. Huck realizes what has happened and determines to rescue Jim. He
seeks the Phelps farm. By a stroke of luck, they are relatives of Tom Sawyer's, and
mistakenly identify Huck as Tom, come to pay a visit. When Tom arrives a few hours later,
he falls in with Huck's deception, pretending to be his brother Sid.

Chapters 34-43: Jim's Rescue

Tom agrees to help Huck rescue Jim. He insists that the escape follow models from all of his
favorite prison stories: he smuggles in items past the unwitting Phelpses. He makes Jim sleep
with spiders and rats, and write a prison journal on a shirt. He also warns the Phelpses
 anonymously. In the escape, Tom gets shot in the leg. Jim and Huck each return and are
caught in the act of seeking help for Tom.

Finally Tom reveals that Jim is in fact no longer a slave: Miss Watson died and set him free
in her will. Tom's Aunt Polly arrives and clears up the case of mistaken identity. Huck, upset
by the trick played on him and Jim, accepts Tom's explanation that he wanted "the adventure"
of the escape. Tom gives Jim forty dollars for his trouble. Now that everyone knows he is still
alive, Huck worries about Pap, but Jim tells him not to bother: Pap was the dead man in the
house floating down the river. Huck ends the novel with a plan to "light out for the Territory
ahead of the rest" before the women try again to "sivilize" him.

NEXT:Chapter Summaries

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 How does Jim play the role of a father figure towards Huck throughtout the
story The Adventures...

In Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Jim represents different

things to Huck that make him a father-figure. Jim loves Huck and forgives him
when he his less than kind to him, and...

 Who is the narrator of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?

The narrator of this novel is Huck Finn himself. He is a young boy without a
mother and whose father is considered the town drunk (when he's around at
all). We learn a lot about Huck Finn in...
 How does Grangerfords/Shephersons feud change Huckleberry Finn in The
Adventures of Huckleberry...

At first, Huck's main reaction to the feud is confusion. He doesn't understand the
reasons for the feud and the continued killing back and forth between the
Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons, and...

 What are examples of irony in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?

The major example of irony that runs throughout the entire book is the portrayal of
a society that calls itself civilised and Christian yet very often behaves in a quite
different manner. The...

 Why is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn considered a classic?

Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is regarded by many as the

greatest literary achievement America has yet produced. Featuring a child as the
protagonist and narrator and using...