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Huckleberry Finn Summary
Huckleberry Finn (1885) has been called the Odyssey of the Mississippi.
This is a story of life on and along the great river, just before the
middle of the nineteenth century. Huckleberry Finn, the son of a drunkard,
and the friend of Tom Sawyer, is the hero of the book. The reader becomes
deeply interested in the fortunes of Jim, a runaway slave, who accompanies
Huck on a raft down the river, and who is almost hourly in danger of being
caught and returned or again enslaved by some chance white man.
One of the strongest scenes in the story is where Huck debates with himself
whether he shall write the owner where to capture Jim, or whether he shall
aid the poor creature to secure his freedom. Since Huck was a child of the
South, there was no doubt in his mind that punishment in the great
hereafter awaited one who deprived another of his property, and Jim was
worth eight hundred dollars. Huck did not wish to lose his soul, and so he
wrote a letter to the owner. Before sending it, however, he, like Hamlet,
argued the case with himself. Should he send the letter or forfeit human
respect and his soul? The conclusion that Huck reached is thoroughly
characteristic of Mark Twain's attitude toward the weak. The thirty-first
chapter of Huckleberry Finn, in which this incident occurs, could not
have been written by one who did not thoroughly appreciate the way in which
the South regarded those who aided in the escape of a slave. Another unique
episode of the story is the remarkable dramatic description of the deadly
feud between the families of the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords.
This story is Mark Twain's masterpiece, and it is not improbable that it
will continue to be read as long as the Mississippi flows toward the Gulf.
Of Mark Twain's achievement in these two tales, Professor William Lyon
Phelps of Yale says: "He has done something which many popular novelists
have signally failed to accomplish--he has created real characters. His two
wonderful boys, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, are wonderful in quite
different ways. The creator of Tom exhibited remarkable observation; the
creator of Huck showed the divine touch of imagination.... Tom Sawyer and
Huckleberry Finn are prose epics of American life."
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