I read the novel a few times in high school when I had a phase where I wanted to read old classics. My classmates smiled at me, but understanding the novel was not easy for them. Actually, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer from 1876, but you can read the sometimes humorous, sometimes snappy book without the history know. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is considered one of the most successful works of North American literature.
Looking at the perspective of the first-person narrator Huckleberry Finn, his distance to the bourgeois world immediately stands out of the novel from the beginning. The widow Douglas wants to ‘sivilize’ him, but such a life is for Huck just horribly regular and decent. When he gets back into his rags and his sugarcane, he feels free and satisfied. In the report of regular life, he complains that he had to come to dinner on time. He has no sympathy for the prayer: The widow bows her head and has nibbled on the food.
Stew, in which everything blurs, he prefers bourgeois food. He does not understand the biblical teaching and has no interest in Moses because a considerable amount is already dead and Huck is not interested in the dead. He criticizes the fact that he is not allowed to smoke with reference to Moses, then referring to the widow, she sniffs, but of course, that was right because she did it. Huck lives in the present, free from conventions and worries.
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In Huck’s view, in presentation, choice of words and comments, bourgeois life seems alienated, it loses the status of the self-evident; this can have the value of humor for the bourgeois reader and then be diminished as a children’s book, but it can also become sharp satire: for example, in the portrayal of the Grangerfords in the 17th and 18th chapters, in the daughter’s poetic poetry and the senseless feud between the pious families. The first part of the book deals with the flight of Jim and Huck into freedom, yet this adventurous part is already ironic of Tom’s adventure games. The second part can be seen as a social satire on life in the South.
The end of the book is, I would say ”funny’: Huck wants to free Jim after inner ‘fight’ and unexpectedly learns Tom’s help, but in reality, Jim is already free. The final part seems to me as an irony of the adventure novel, as an ironic exit of the author from the story of the failed adventurous escape, search for freedom and river cruise. Tom’s picture is not drawn without distance. A distancing from Tom’s attitude to the adventurous liberation of niggers is even more evident: he wants to emerge from it like a hero and make a life task out of it; he pays Jim for the suffering he went through. Huck’s assessment of Tom’s attitude is significant.
Tom also caricatures the white stereotype, who likes to supervise, and in doing so follows the morality and principles of a typical White around this time. In the treatment of Negroes, socio-critical accents remain perceptible. In the enlightenment of the problems of liberation as error and play. The socio-critical aspects are combined with comedy-like elements of confusion between Tom and Huck. As well as the unexpected ‘rescue’ of Jim. This comic solution of factual and narrative problems is possible at a time when the question of slavery is legally decided, that is, after the civil war of 1861/65.
As an apolitical solution, however, it somehow remains unsatisfactory, but necessary in a narrative playing before the South in 1865; perhaps this also speaks of the resignation of Mark Twain, who has come up against the limits in his search for freedom and space. Mark Twain has created a wise fool with his Huckleberry Finn, which has not only fascinated young readers. There is much to suggest that Twain’s sympathies are gradually shifting from Tom to Huck. Huck just does what people love and dream of to this day: he lives freedom.
