Ȼɚɥɬɢɣɫɤɢɣ ɂɧɫɬɢɬɭɬ ɂɧɨɫɬɪɚɧɧɵɯ əɡɵɤɨɜ ɢ

Ɇɟɠɤɭɥɶɬɭɪɧɨɝɨ ɋɨɬɪɭɞɧɢɱɟɫɬɜɚ

Essay on Literature:
³Adventures of Huckleberry Finn´
by Mark Twain

ȼɵɩɨɥɧɢɥ: ɫɬɭɞɟɧɬ Ȼɪɨɜɱɭɤ Ⱥ.ȼ., 421-1

ɉɪɨɜɟɪɢɥɚ: ɩɪɟɩɨɞɚɜɚɬɟɥɶ əɤɨɜɥɟɜɚ Ƚ.ȼ.

V
 


 
 3amuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 ± April 21, 1910) better
known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist.

Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which would later provide the setting
for Ä

 and  . He apprenticed with a printer. He also
worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to his older brother Orion's
newspaper. After toiling as a printer in various cities, he became a master riverboat
pilot on the Mississippi River, before heading west to join Orion. He was a failure
at gold mining, so he next turned to journalism. While a reporter, he wrote a
humorous story,  
    , which proved
to be very popular and brought him nationwide attention. His travelogues were also
well-received. Twain had found his calling.
Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which would later provide the setting
for Ä

 and  . He apprenticed with a printer. He also
worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to his older brother Orion's
newspaper. After toiling as a printer in various cities, he became a master riverboat
pilot on the Mississippi River, before heading west to join Orion. He was a failure
at gold mining, so he next turned to journalism. While a reporter, he wrote a
humorous story,  
    , which proved
to be very popular and brought him nationwide attention . His travelogues were also
well-received. Twain had found his calling.
He achieved great success as a writer and public speaker. His wit and satire
earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists,
industrialists, and European royalty.
However, he lacked financial acumen. Though he made a great deal of
money from his writings and lectures, he squandered it on various ventures, in
particular the Paige Compositor, and was forced to declare bankruptcy. With the
help of Henry Huttleston Rogers, however, he eventually overcame his financial
troubles. Twain worked hard to ensure that all of his creditors were paid in full,
even though his bankruptcy had relieved him of the legal responsibility.
Born during a visit by Halley's Comet, he died on its return. He was lauded
as the "greatest American humorist of his age", and William Faulkner called Twain
"the father of American literature".
He is noted for his novels   Ä

 (1885), called
"the Great American Novel", and     (1876). I would
like to tell about the first one.
  Ä

 is a book by Mark Twain, first published in
England in December 1884 and in the United 3tates in February 1885. Considered
as one of the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in
major American literature to be written in the vernacular, characterized by local
color regionalism. It is told in the first person by Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, a
friend of Tom 3awyer and narrator of two other Twain novels (  
  and  

).
The book is noted for its colorful description of people and places along
the Mississippi River. 3atirizing a 3outhern antebellum society that had ceased to
exist about twenty years before the work was published;   
Ä

 is an often scathing look at entrenched attitudes,
particularly racism.
The work has been popular with readers since its publication and is taken as
a sequel to    . It has also been the continued object of
study by serious literary critics. It was criticized upon release because of its coarse
language and became even more controversial in the 20th century because of its
perceived use of racial stereotypes and because of its frequent use of the racial slur
"nigger", despite that the main protagonist, and the tenor of the book, is anti -
racist. According to the January 20, 2011  
 article, 
  Ä

 novel will be released in a new edition. Two
words will be changed throughout the whole book, "injun" and "nigger" to "indian"
and "slave". The book is being changed as quoted in the article, "only to make it
viable to the 21st century".
The story begins in fictional 3t. Petersburg, Missouri, on the shores of
the Mississippi River, sometime between 1835 (when the first steamboat s ailed
down the Mississippi) and 1845. Two young boys, Tom 3awyer and Huckleberry
Finn, have each come into a considerable sum of money as a result of their earlier
adventures (   ). Huck has been placed under the
guardianship of the Widow Douglas, who, together with her sister, Miss Watson,
are attempting to "civilize" him. Huck appreciates their efforts, but finds civilized
life confining. In the beginning of the story, Tom 3awyer appears briefly, helping
Huck escape at night from the house, past Miss Watson's slave, Jim. They meet up
with Tom 3awyer's self-proclaimed gang, who plot to carry out adventurous
crimes. Life is changed by the sudden appearance of Huck's shiftless father "Pap",
an abusive parent and drunkard. Although Huck is successful in preventing his Pap
from acquiring his fortune, Pap forcibly gains custody of Huck and the two move
to the backwoods where Huck is kept locked inside his father's cabin. Equally
dissatisfied with life with his father, Huck escapes from the cabin, elaborately
fakes his own death, and sets off down the Mississippi River, where he meets Jim,
and together, they spend nights and days jour neying down the river, both in search
of freedom.
 While traveling on a raft down the river, Huck and Jim have many
adventures and during many long talks, become best of friends. They find a house
with a dead man. They end up stealing many things from the house. They find a
wrecked ship, and go on it, only to be mixed up with murderers. They get away
with money and some other goods. They get separated from each other in the
heavy fog, but eventually find each other. A steamboat crashes into their raft and
Jim and Huck are separated again. Huck has a run -in with the Grangerfords and the
3hepherdsons, two families at war with each other. He is reunited with Jim shortly
after this. Then, they meet the King and the Duke, and get into a good deal of
trouble performing plays. The King and the Duke pretend to be Peter Wilks' long
lost brothers from England and try to steal all of the money left behind in his will.
They escape before they are caught. Huck finally gets rid of them, but is left to
search for Jim, who gets sold by the King. He ends up at Tom 3awyer's Aunt
3ally's house, where Tom and Huck rescue Jim.

Through all of the adventures down the river, Huck learns a variety of life
lessons and improves as a person. He develops a conscience and truly feels for
humanity. The complexity of his character is enhanced by his ability to relate so
easily with nature and the river.

From the beginning of the novel, Twain makes it clear that Huck is a boy
who comes from the lowest levels of white society. His father is a drunk and a
ruffian who disappears for months on end. Huck himself is dirty and frequently
homeless. Although the Widow Douglas attempts to ³reform´ Huck, he resists her
attempts and maintains his independent ways. The community has failed to protect
him from his father, and though the Widow finally gives Huck some of the
schooling and religious training that he had missed, he has not been indoctrinated
with social values in the same way a middle -class boy like Tom 3awyer has been.
Huck¶s distance from mainstream society makes him skeptical of the world around
him and the ideas it passes on to him.

Huck¶s instinctual distrust and his experiences as he travels down the river
force him to question the things society has taught him. According to the law, Jim
is Miss Watson¶s property, but according to Huck¶s sense of logic and fairness, it
seems ³right´ to help Jim. Huck¶s natural intelligence and his willingness to think
through a situation on its own merits lead him to some conclusions that are correct
in their context but that would shock white society. For example, Huck discovers,
when he and Jim meet a group of slave -hunters, that telling a lie is sometimes the
right course of action.

Because Huck is a child, the world seems new to him. Everything he

encounters is an occasion for thought. Because of his background, however, he
does more than just apply the rules that he has been taught ²he creates his own
rules. Yet Huck is not some kind of independent moral genius. He must still
struggle with some of the preconceptions about blacks that society has ingrained in
him, and at the end of the novel, he shows himself all too willing to follow Tom
3awyer¶s lead. But even these failures are part of what makes Huck appealing and
sympathetic. He is only a boy, after all , and therefore fallible. Imperfect as he is,
Huck represents what anyone is capable of becoming: a thinking, feeling human
being rather than a mere cog in the machine of society.

Jim, Huck¶s companion as he travels down the river, is a man of remarkable

intelligence and compassion. At first glance, Jim seems to be superstitious to the
point of idiocy, but a careful reading of the time that Huck and Jim spend on
Jackson¶s Island reveals that Jim¶s superstitions conceal a deep knowledge of the
natural world and represent an alternate form of ³truth´ or intelligence. Moreover,
Jim has one of the few healthy, functioning families in the novel. Although he has
been separated from his wife and children, he misses them terribly, and it is only
the thought of a permanent separation from them that motivates his criminal act of
running away from Miss Watson. On the river, Jim becomes a surrogate father, as
well as a friend, to Huck, taking care of him without being intrusive or smothering.
He cooks for the boy and shelters him from some of the worst horrors that they
encounter, including the sight of Pap¶s corpse, and, for a time, the news of his
father¶s passing.

Like Huck, Jim is realistic about his situation and must find ways of
accomplishing his goals without incurring the wrath of those who could turn him
in. In this position, he is seldom able to act boldly or speak his mind. Nonetheless,
despite these restrictions and constant fear, Jim consistently acts as a noble human
being and a loyal friend. In fact, Jim co uld be described as the only real adult in the
novel, and the only one who provides a positive, respectable example for Huck to
follow.

Tom is the same age as Huck and his best friend. Whereas Huck¶s birth and
upbringing have left him in poverty and on the margins of society, Tom has been
raised in relative comfort. As a result, his beliefs are an unfortunate combination of
what he has learned from the adults around him and the fanciful notions he has
gleaned from reading romance and adventure novels. Tom b elieves in sticking
strictly to ³rules,´ most of which have more to do with style than with morality or
anyone¶s welfare. Tom is thus the perfect foil for Huck: his rigid adherence to rules
and precepts contrasts with Huck¶s tendency to question authority and think for
himself.

Although Twain wrote Ä


 two decades after the
Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War, America ²and especially
the 3outh²was still struggling with racism and the aftereffects of slavery. By the
early 1880s, Reconstruction, the plan to put the United 3tates back together after
the war and integrate freed slaves into society, had hit shaky ground, although it
had not yet failed outright. As Twain worked on his novel, race relations, which
seemed to be on a positive path in the years following the Civil War, once again
became strained. The imposition of Jim Crow laws, designed to limit the power of
blacks in the 3outh in a variety of indirect ways, brought the beginning of a new,
insidious effort to oppress. The new racism of the 3outh, less institutionalized and
monolithic, was also more difficult to combat. 3lavery could be outlawed, but
when white 3outherners enacted racist laws or policies under a professed motive of
self-defense against newly freed blacks, far fewer people, Northern or 3outhern,
saw the act as immoral and rushed to combat it.

Although Twain wrote the novel after slavery was abolished, he set it several
decades earlier, when slavery was still a fact of life. But even by Twain¶s time,
things had not necessarily gotten much better for blacks in the 3outh. In this light,
we might read Twain¶s depiction of slavery as an allegorical representation of the
condition of blacks in the United 3tates even  the abolition of slavery. Just as
slavery places the noble and moral Jim under the control of white society, no
matter how degraded that white society may be, so too did the insidious racism that
arose near the end of Reconstruction oppress black men for illogical and
hypocritical reasons. The result is a world of moral confusion, in which seemingly
³good´ white people such as Miss Watson and 3ally Phelps express no concern
about the injustice of slavery or the cruelty of separating Jim from his family.

By focusing on Huck¶s education, Ä


 fits into the tradition of
the bildungsroman: a novel depicting an individual¶s maturation and development.
As a poor, uneducated boy, for all intents and purposes an orphan, Huck distrusts
the morals and precepts of the society that treats him as an o utcast and fails to
protect him from abuse. This apprehension about society, and his growing
relationship with Jim, lead Huck to question many of the teachings that he has
received, especially regarding race and slavery. More than once, we see Huck
choose to ³go to hell´ rather than go along with the rules and follow what he has
been taught. Huck bases these decisions on his experiences, his own sense of logic,
and what his developing conscience tells him. On the raft, away from civilization,
Huck is especially free from society¶s rules, able to make his own decisions
without restriction. Through deep introspection, he comes to his own conclusions,
unaffected by the accepted ²and often hypocritical ²rules and values of 3outhern
culture. By the novel¶s end, Huc k has learned to ³read´ the world around him, to
distinguish good, bad, right, wrong, menace, friend, and so on. His moral
development is sharply contrasted to the character of Tom 3awyer, who is
influenced by a bizarre mix of adventure novels and 3unday -school teachings,
which he combines to justify his outrageous and potentially harmful escapades.

My thought is that everybody should read this novel. This book helps to
learn the time, customs, morals and manners of the midst of XIX century. It shows
us moral growth of the human, change of his opinions and way of thinking. 3o I
definitely suggest to go and buy this book as it is really worth of reading.
 Bibliography

1.? Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

2.? www.wikipedia.ru