I. Huck Finn
A. Characters
1. Huck Finn
- Narrator
2. Tom Sawyer
- Huck's friend who dreams
3. Widow Douglas
- Huck's guardian
4. Miss Watson
- Widow's sister
5. Jim
- Miss Watson's slave
6. Pap
- Huck's father
7. Judge Thatcher
-Man who invests Huck's money
8. Jim Turner
-Murderer on a sinking ship
9. The Grangerfords
- Feud with Shepherdsons
10. Duke and King
- Frauds; cheaters
11. Boggs
- Drunkard who is shot
12. Col. Sherburn
- Man who shoots Boggs
13. Peter Wilks
- Wealthy Englishman who died
14. Uncle Silas Phelps
- Buys Jim for ransom
15. Aunt Sally Phelps
- Tom's aunt/ Later Adopts Huck
B. Setting (1840’s-1850’s?)
1. Pre-Civil War Southern United States along the Mississippi River.
2. Locations & Items
A. St. Petersburg (Modeled on Twain’s hometown of Hannibal)
B. Jackson Island the Walter Scott (Sinking Steamboat)
C. Cairo (Southern-most part of Illinoiswhere the Ohio meets the Miss. River)
D. Booth’s Landing
E. Spanish Island
F. Royal Nonesuch –play/production put on by Duke and King
G. Sheffield- Area in England where The Wilks Brothers
are supposed to be from.
H. Pikesville- Typical Arkansas town along the Mississippi
I. Parkville- Near Silas Phelps Plantation/ King and Duke
finally get caught.
C. Plot
Story is told in 3 sections, with no obvious break between them:
–1. Huck – the narrator – introduces himself, his friend Tom,
and the adult slave Jim
–2. Huck and Jim run away down the river
–3. Huck on Uncle Silas’ farm with Tom and Jim
D. Narration
•Huck is the story teller.
–This forces us to see the world through his eyes
and hear it through his language. Vernacular- common tongue
–As such, the telling is at least as important as the “themes” of the tale.
E. Themes
•about growing up – coming of age “bildungsroman”
•no real plot- A picaresque novel is an adventure story
that involves an anti-hero or picaro who wanders
around with no actual destination in mind.
•satire of the post-Civil War American South
•Huck Finn is an example of American Realism,
literary movement that focuses on the individual rather than the plot,
and how the individual responds and reacts to his/her environment.
•allegory about religious hypocrisy
•allegory about good and evil in ordinary society
Allegory = an extended metaphor in which symbolic fictional figures
and actions reveal certain truths or generalizations about human existence
II Huck Finn
Background
Mark Twain, Samuel Langhorn Clemens
Written After the Civil War 1885/ takes place before the civil war
1840s and 1850s
Narrator is 12 year old Boy
A social and Political Satire
A. Characters
1. Jim
-One of Miss Watson’s household slaves.
Jim is superstitious and occasionally sentimental,
but he is also intelligent, practical, and ultimately more of an adult
than anyone else 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.
2. Pap
-Huck’s father, the town drunk and ne’er-do-well.
Pap is a wreck when he appears at the beginning of the novel,
with disgusting, ghostlike white skin and tattered clothes.
The illiterate Pap disapproves of Huck’s education
and beats him frequently.
Pap represents both the general debasement of white society
and the failure of family structures in the novel.
3. King and Duke
- 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
Bildgewater. 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.
4. Grangerfords and Shepherdsons
- A family that takes Huck in after a steamboat hits his raft,
separating him from Jim. The kindhearted Grangerfords,
who offer Huck a place to stay in their tacky country home,
are locked in a long-standing feud with another local family,
the Shepherdsons.
Twain uses the two families to engage in some rollicking humor
and to mock a overly romanticizes ideas about family honor. Ultimately, the
families’ sensationalized feud gets many of them killed.
5. Tom
Huck’s friend, and the protagonist of Tom Sawyer, the novel to which
Huckleberry Finn is ostensibly the sequel. In Huckleberry Finn,
Tom serves as a foil to Huck: imaginative, dominating, and given to wild
plans taken from the plots of adventure novels, Tom is everything that Huck
is not. Tom’s stubborn reliance on the “authorities” of romance novels leads
him to acts of incredible stupidity and startling cruelty. His rigid adherence
to society’s conventions aligns Tom with the “sivilizing” forces that Huck
learns to see through and gradually abandons.
6. Widow Douglas Miss Watson
Two wealthy sisters who live together in a large house in St. Petersburg
and who adopt Huck. The gaunt and severe Miss Watson is the most
prominent representative of the hypocritical religious and ethical values
Twain criticizes in the novel. The Widow Douglas is somewhat gentler in her
beliefs and has more patience with the mischievous Huck. When Huck acts in
a manner contrary to societal expectations, it is the Widow Douglas whom he
fears disappointing.
7. Jim TurnerThe murderer whom Huck tries to save from the The Walter Scott
8. Judge Thatcher
Keeps Huck’s money and invests it for him. Trustworthy
9. Boggs
Drunkard…Pokes fun at southern society. Killed by Col. Sherburn in a gunfight.
10. Col. Sherburn
Kills Boggs’s in an argument. Shoots him to defend his honor. Twain pokes fun at
the southern aristocracy. Later in almost lynched by a mob of townspeople.
12. Peter Wilks
Wealthy businessman, dies and leaves his money and business to his brothers from
England. The duke and the king pretend to be his wealthy educated brothers who
are missionaries. Twain uses this situation to poke fun at people in general and show
how easily deceived people tend to be, especially when in desperate or troubling
times.
13. Silas Phelps
Tom’s uncle whom Huck and Tom stay with while pretending to be Tom and Sid
Sawyer. He releases Jim from custody then gets the news that Miss Watson Died
and Jim is freed.
14. Aunt Sally
Married to Silas and Tom Sawyer’s Aunt, takes in “Tom and Sid.”
Takes care of Huck at the end of the novel.