“Huckleberry Finn.” Mark Twain. Exploring Why This Is the Great American Novel.

Mark Twain:

A book of mine in which a sound heart & a deformed conscience come into collision & conscience suffers defeat.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

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It is fittingly ironic that the greatest American novel (opinion, of course) is the most misunderstood. Huck is a biting satire ¹ of “sivilization,” its values and hypocrisy; as with all satire, it runs the risk of readers taking the meanings at face value and missing the irony. At the end of the novel, what Tom Sawyer sees as fun–making a free-Jim attempt a game–Twain sees as cruel. To call Huck Finn a basically humorous book misrepresents the painful-to-observe events throughout. But there is no denying that Twain’s genius with humor mitigates the gravitas² of the intents and provides the reader with a fun, enjoyable read, full of quotable observations.

• “But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” (Huck, Chapter 43).
• “I wish we could have some bad luck like this every day, Jim.” (Huck, regarding finding money after handling a snake-skin).
• “Yes; en I’s rich now, come to look at it. I owns myself, en I’s worth eight hundred dollars.” (Jim).
• “If you are with the quality, or at a funeral, or trying to go to sleep when you ain’t sleepy—if you are anywheres where it won’t do for you to scratch, why you will itch all over in upwards of a thousand places.” (Huck).
• “Jim said bees wouldn’t sting idiots; but I didn’t believe that, because I had tried them lots of times myself, and they wouldn’t sting me.” (Huck).

Another possible impediment to understanding is the use of Southern vernacular speech, specifically Pike’s County dialect, a regional, rural, and less educated form of American English. This serves a dual purpose: it provides general atmosphere (“less educated”), and it also delineates character (compare Huck’s father’s speech to Huck’s). Most importantly, it provides a contrast between our expectations based on the way Huck and Jim speak and the reality of their strength of heart, one of the story’s main ironies. It may provide some difficulty to the reader, but that can be overcome by reading aloud those passages for a clearer understanding.

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In the first few chapters we meet the cast of characters;

• Tom Sawyer: Huck’s friend and partner in mischief. He represents the thoughtlessness of a deformed conscience, mirrored in his playful–but often hurtful–actions, such as the robber band that Tom and Huck’s friends plan to create: “So Tom got out a sheet of paper that he had wrote the oath on, and read it. It swore every boy to stick to the band, and never tell any of the secrets; and if anybody done anything to any boy in the band, whichever boy was ordered to kill that person and his family must do it, and he mustn’t eat and he mustn’t sleep till he had killed them and hacked a cross in their breasts, which was the sign of the band. And nobody that didn’t belong to the band could use that mark, and if he did he must be sued; and if he done it again he must be killed. And if anybody that belonged to the band told the secrets, he must have his throat cut, and then have his carcass burnt up and the ashes scattered all around, and his name blotted off of the list with blood and never mentioned again by the gang, but have a curse put on it and be forgot forever….Some thought it would be good to kill the families of boys that told the secrets. Tom said it was a good idea, so he took a pencil and wrote it in,  and enjoying playing pranks on Jim, who is “just” a slave and a “nigger”³ and therefore simple-minded, one of the first examples of Twain’s incisive satire.
• The Widow Douglas and her sister, Miss Watson: Huck’s “foster” family, responsible for his well-being and education. Her sister, Miss Watson, a tolerable slim old maid, with goggles on, had just come to live with her, and took a set at me now with a spelling-book. She worked me middling hard for about an hour, and then the widow made her ease up. I couldn’t stood it much longer….Then she told me all about the bad place, and I said I wished I was there. She got mad then, but I didn’t mean no harm. All I wanted was to go somewheres; all I wanted was a change, I warn’t particular.
• Pap: Huck’s mean and cruel father, the epitome of a “deformed conscience.” Pap is a major foil in the novel, an enfranchised white man, loathesome and evil, contrasted with:
• Jim, a subjugated black man and slave, the epitome of a “sound heart,” who increasingly becomes Huck’s surrogate father on their journey together.

Jim is introduced in Chapter 2, and Huck and Tom play a trick on him so that he would believe that witches had visited him as he slept. Jim takes the bait, his enforced ignorance making him seem the simpleton the boys believe him to be, and he becomes famous among his peers. Jim was most ruined for a servant, because he got stuck up on account of having seen the devil and been rode by witches. That Huck and Jim’s relationship begins this way, meanly humorous and deprecating, sets the low point from which they evolve and indicates the difficulty for Huck in altering his perspective as they move down the river. The irony, of course, is that Huck is just as ignorant and superstitious:Then Miss Watson she took me in the closet and prayed, but nothing come of it. She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn’t so. I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks. It warn’t any good to me without hooks. I tried for the hooks three or four times, but somehow I couldn’t make it work. By-and-by, one day, I asked Miss Watson to try for me, but she said I was a fool. She never told me why, and I couldn’t make it out no way.

Chapter 5: Pap shows up.He was most fifty, and he looked it. His hair was long and tangled and greasy, and hung down, and you could see his eyes shining through like he was behind vines. It was all black, no gray; so was his long, mixed-up whiskers. There warn’t no color in his face, where his face showed; it was white; not like another man’s white, but a white to make a body sick, a white to make a body’s flesh crawl—a tree-toad white, a fish-belly white. There is no humor when Pap is in a scene. Although we know we are looking at a fool, he is a dangerous fool. and the way he treats Huck is nothing short of child abuse.

Pap had abandoned Huck a while ago, but we learn he is aware of the substantial wealth Huck accrued when he and Tom discovered pirate-abandoned treasure in a cave. This is why he has returned.

Pap’s cruel, depraved, abusive nature becomes the yardstick against which we measure Jim’s behaviour toward Huck. Pap may be all of those things, but he is a white man and thus enfranchised with certain privileges, protected and enabled by the hypocrisy of the “Christian” South. The judge and the widow went to law to get the court to take me away from him and let one of them be my guardian; but it was a new judge that had just come, and he didn’t know the old man; so he said courts mustn’t interfere and separate families if they could help it; said he’d druther not take a child away from its father. So Judge Thatcher and the widow had to quit on the business.

The next few chapters chronicle Pap’s attempt to ingratiate himself with the Judge, but his nature eventually betrays him. In desperation, mostly for the money, he kidnaps Huck and keeps him locked in a cabin: At first Huck enjoys his new perceived freedom: It was kind of lazy and jolly, laying off comfortable all day, smoking and fishing, and no books nor study. But Pap is Pap. I t was pretty good times up in the woods there, take it all around. But by-and-by pap got too handy with his hick’ry, and I couldn’t stand it. I was all over welts. He got to going away so much, too, and locking me in. Once he locked me in and was gone three days. It was dreadful lonesome. Between the humor, the layering of satire, and Huck’s simple language, sometimes the gravity of what we are reading takes a while to sink in. In effect, this passage has described extensive physical abuse and neglect. It is not funny. And always present is the irony of Pap’s privileged status as a white man, in spite of his nature. We see some of Twain’s most biting satire in a Pap “soliloquy”:

Huck finally manages to escape, using his native intelligence to stage his disappearance to look like he had been killed. He finds a canoe, thus initiating the “picaresque”⁴ nature of Huck’s adventures on the river.

Chapter 8 is a turning point in the novel:

There are hints throughout this passage that Huck’s loneliness and Jim’s humanity will over-ride society’s hold on Huck’s conscience and heart.

From this point the novel becomes increasingly episodic: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Concurrently, Huck and Jim’s relationship evolves, as does Huck’s “heart.”

But Huck is still Huck and plays another “trick” on Jim, placing a dead rattlesnake next to him as he sleeps, However, the snake’s mate arrives and bites Jim, who survives, but only after four days of recovery. I warn’t going to let Jim find out it was all my fault, not if I could help it.

They come across a dead man who had been shot in the back. Jim doesn’t allow Huck to look at him. This has consequences.

They survive by stealing as they go, exercing their relative morality: Mornings before daylight I slipped into cornfields and borrowed a watermelon, or a mushmelon, or a punkin, or some new corn, or things of that kind. Pap always said it warn’t no harm to borrow things if you was meaning to pay them back some time; but the widow said it warn’t anything but a soft name for stealing, and no decent body would do it. Jim said he reckoned the widow was partly right and pap was partly right; so the best way would be for us to pick out two or three things from the list and say we wouldn’t borrow them any more—then he reckoned it wouldn’t be no harm to borrow

Episode: Huck wants to find out what is transpiring on land, so he disguises himself as a girl and visits a homestead where he learns that there is a $300 reward out for the capture of Jim, who is suspected of killing Huck, and a $200 reward for Pap for the same reason. Huck also learns that the smoke from their campfire has been spotted, so they have to leave.

Episode: Jim and Huck continue down stream, traveling mostly by night to avoid detection. Five nights past St. Louis, they come across a steamboat that’s run aground on a rock. Against Jim’s better judgment, they tie their raft to the steamboat and go aboard. Once on the boat, Huck hears two criminals scheming to kill a third. When Huck manages to find Jim, Jim tells him the raft has floated away. After recovering from his shock, Huck helps Jim find the criminals’ skiff. Once they find it, they cut it loose and float down the river in search of their raft. Huck feels bad about leaving the criminals to drown on the steamboat (Now was the first time that I begun to worry about the men—I reckon I hadn’t had time to before. I begun to think how dreadful it was, even for murderers, to be in such a fix. I says to myself, there ain’t no telling but I might come to be a murderer myself yet, and then how would I like it? ), so he finds a ferryboat and tells the captain that there are people on the steamboat that need saving. As Huck makes his way back to Jim and the skiff, he sees the steamboat float by (with no survivors). Well, before long, here comes the wreck, dim and dusky, sliding along down! A kind of cold shiver went through me, and then I struck out for her. She was very deep, and I see in a minute there warn’t much chance for anybody being alive in her. I pulled all around her and hollered a little, but there wasn’t any answer; all dead still. I felt a little bit heavy-hearted about the gang, but not much. He finds Jim, they sink the skiff, and sleep like dead people.  No second thoughts.

Chapter 15 marks a major turning point in the novel. It is a testimony to Twain’s ability to turn humor into pathos, in a very moving scene between Huck and Jim.

At this point a sight-obscuring fog sets in, and Huck is separated from the raft. After a long while and a sleep, Then I see another speck, and chased that; then another, and this time I was right. It was the raft.

But yet again, Huck is still Huck, and he decides to play another trick on Jim.

Jim’s basic, simple goodness is revealed in his joy that Huck is still alive, a joy which also reveals his deepening feelings for Huck. He is willing to suspend his disbelief, with great difficulty, rather than doubt Huck’s word. The decency of this “ignorant slave” is moving. Huck, of course, is blind to the significance of Jim’s feelings and perpetuates the “trick.” The complete insensitivity of this “superior” white boy is disturbing and off-putting, if not cruel. Jim has gained our sympathy; Huck has lost it.

Our sympathies in both directions continue to deepen:

The profound power of Jim’s words brings the story to a breath-holding standstill. The ball is in Huck’s court. The novel will proceed in one of two ways from here: whether “Huck is still Huck,” or whether Jim’s decency and dignity have any effect on him. This would produce two entirely different books.

Not to overstate, but is this a transformed Huck? How and if that concept develops is the “stuff” of the rest of the novel. That ambiguity is soon made apparent:

The “collision” referred to in Twain’s statement–A book of mine in which a sound heart & a deformed conscience come into collision & conscience suffers defeat–becomes increasingly clear because we see Huck grappling with indecision, his heart at war with what he has been taught. And maybe for the first time, our hearts go out to this boy who does the right thing in spite of being convinced that it is the “wrong” thing.

They went off and I got aboard the raft, feeling bad and low, because I knowed very well I had done wrong, and I see it warn’t no use for me to try to learn to do right; a body that don’t get started right when he’s little ain’t got no show—when the pinch comes there ain’t nothing to back him up and keep him to his work, and so he gets beat. Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on; s’pose you’d a done right and give Jim up, would you felt better than what you do now? No, says I, I’d feel bad—I’d feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what’s the use you learning to do right when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn’t answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn’t bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time.

The episodic nature of the novel continues, with scathing satire of the “sivilization” Huck encounters.

Episode: The Feud. A violent, decades-long, and senseless blood rivalry between two wealthy, aristocratic Southern families–the Grangerfords and the Shephersons. Neither family remembers how the feud began, yet they continue to kill each other, including a boy that Huck befriends, reflecting a toxic, irrational, and ironic cycle of violence and Southern honor that causes Huck to flee in disgust. 

All of a sudden, bang! bang! bang! goes three or four guns—the men had slipped around through the woods and come in from behind without their horses! The boys jumped for the river—both of them hurt—and as they swum down the current the men run along the bank shooting at them and singing out, “Kill them, kill them!” It made me so sick I most fell out of the tree. I ain’t a-going to tell all that happened—it would make me sick again if I was to do that. I wished I hadn’t ever come ashore that night to see such things. I ain’t ever going to get shut of them—lots of times I dream about them.

Episode: An extended section in which Huck and Jim meet the “King” a.k.a. ‘le Dauphin,’ erstwhile king of France, and the “Duke,” two completely amoral conmen who fleece townspeople with complete disregard for thought or feeling about the consequences of their actions. They are the ultimate manifestation of the thoughtlessness and callowness of Tom Sawyer–and Huck–earlier in the book and force Huck to re-evaluate “tricks.” Well, if ever I struck anything like it, I’m a nigger. It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race.

Huck and Jim meet a family whose goodness–especially the daughter, Mary Jane (Laying her silky hand on mine in that kind of a way that I said I would die first)–touches Huck, so when the King and the Duke manage to swindle them/her out of their inheritance–including cash and property (i.e. also slaves), they have finally gone too far for Huck. And for the first time, Huck sees slaves and whites who care for each other.

So the next day after the funeral, along about noon-time, the girls’ joy got the first jolt. A couple of nigger traders come along, and the king sold them the niggers reasonable, for three-day drafts as they called it, and away they went, the two sons up the river to Memphis, and their mother down the river to Orleans. I thought them poor girls and them niggers would break their hearts for grief; they cried around each other, and took on so it most made me down sick to see it. The girls said they hadn’t ever dreamed of seeing the family separated or sold away from the town. I can’t ever get it out of my memory, the sight of them poor miserable girls and niggers hanging around each other’s necks and crying.

Huck determines to have the cash and the slaves returned to Mary Jane and her family.

Huck’s heart and civilized conscience continue to “grapple,” but it is becoming clear–to us if not to Huck–which side will win.

Huck manages to “steal” the cash away from the two conmen and hide it in the deceased father’s coffin, about to be buried the next day. He finally reveals his plans to Mary Jane, including why the sale of her slaves won’t go through at auction:

Just let the auction go right along, and don’t worry. Nobody don’t have to pay for the things they buy till a whole day after the auction on accounts of the short notice, and they ain’t going out of this till they get that money; and the way we’ve fixed it the sale ain’t going to count, and they ain’t going to get no money. It’s just like the way it was with the niggers—it warn’t no sale, and the niggers will be back before long. Why, they can’t collect the money for the niggers yet—they’re in the worst kind of a fix, Miss Mary Jane.

Huck’s previously misapplied cleverness finally turns to useful intelligence, yet another step in his “evolution.”

Along with heretofore unknown feelings he now has, toward Mary Jane:

I see the water come into her eyes, too; and she shook me by the hand, hard, and says:

“Good-bye. I’m going to do everything just as you’ve told me; and if I don’t ever see you again, I sha’n’t ever forget you and I’ll think of you a many and a many a time, and I’ll pray for you, too!”—and she was gone.

Pray for me! I reckoned if she knowed me she’d take a job that was more nearer her size. But I bet she done it, just the same—she was just that kind. She had the grit to pray for Judus if she took the notion—there warn’t no back-down to her, I judge. You may say what you want to, but in my opinion she had more sand in her than any girl I ever see; in my opinion she was just full of sand. It sounds like flattery, but it ain’t no flattery. And when it comes to beauty—and goodness, too—she lays over them all. I hain’t ever seen her since that time that I see her go out of that door; no, I hain’t ever seen her since, but I reckon I’ve thought of her a many and a many a million times, and of her saying she would pray for me; and if ever I’d a thought it would do any good for me to pray for her, blamed if I wouldn’t a done it or bust.

There follows the most famous passage of the book, precipitated by Huck’s learning that the conmen had sold Jim for forty dollars (difficult to ignore the relation to Judas’s thirty pieces of silver).

I went to the raft, and set down in the wigwam to think. But I couldn’t come to nothing. I thought till I wore my head sore, but I couldn’t see no way out of the trouble. After all this long journey, and after all we’d done for them scoundrels, here it was all come to nothing, everything all busted up and ruined, because they could have the heart to serve Jim such a trick as that, and make him a slave again all his life, and amongst strangers, too, for forty dirty dollars.

Once I said to myself it would be a thousand times better for Jim to be a slave at home where his family was, as long as he’d got to be a slave, and so I’d better write a letter to Tom Sawyer and tell him to tell Miss Watson where he was. But I soon give up that notion for two things: she’d be mad and disgusted at his rascality and ungratefulness for leaving her, and so she’d sell him straight down the river again; and if she didn’t, everybody naturally despises an ungrateful nigger, and they’d make Jim feel it all the time, and so he’d feel ornery and disgraced. And then think of me! It would get all around that Huck Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom; and if I was ever to see anybody from that town again I’d be ready to get down and lick his boots for shame. That’s just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain’t no disgrace. That was my fix exactly. The more I studied about this, the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling. And at last, when it hit me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven, whilst I was stealing a poor old woman’s nigger that hadn’t ever done me no harm, and now was showing me there’s One that’s always on the lookout, and ain’t a-going to allow no such miserable doings to go only just so fur and no further, I most dropped in my tracks I was so scared. Well, I tried the best I could to kinder soften it up somehow for myself by saying I was brung up wicked, and so I warn’t so much to blame; but something inside of me kept saying, “There was the Sunday-school, you could a gone to it; and if you’d a done it they’d a learnt you there that people that acts as I’d been acting about that nigger goes to everlasting fire.”

The irony here is incisive. Almost everything Huck says is the opposite of what is true and demonstrates sadly how sivilization has warped and deformed his conscience, causing him to be painfully burdened with guilt, for doing the right thing.

It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I couldn’t try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they? It warn’t no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger’s owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie—I found that out.

The moral quandary Huck exhibits here is a far cry from the morally blind Huck we were used to earlier in the book. It is worth noting that this evolution could only occur on the river, away from society, the river providing a kind of symbolic purification.

It would be hard to over-emphasize the significance of that last sentence. It is now clear that the “sound heart” has prevailed over the “deformed conscience,” but to what an enormous degree. Huck is a Southern Christian, willingly giving up his chance for salvation rather than betray his friend, a slave no less. This is not a boyish, impusive decision, but one Huck clearly agonizes over.

It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t. And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.

The satire is scathing here. This boy’s conscience has been so “deformed” by his society his perception of good and evil has been perverted. While our sympathies have now been altered in our admiration of Huck’s doing the right thing–a far cry from the Huck who thought nothing of playing “tricks” on Jim–he is filled with self-condemnation. Oh, he is still Huck–“Now I struck an idea, and fetched it out: ‘It warn’t the grounding—that didn’t keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head.’ ‘Good gracious! anybody hurt?’ ‘No’m. Killed a nigger.’”— as he seems ultimately to be able to brush off his concerns, and as we soon see he can still be influenced by Tom Sawyer, but there is no denying that his good heart has triumphed when it comes to Jim.

Further in the narrative Huck sees that the King and Duke have finally been brought to justice–though typically cruel, a form of torture:

As we struck into the town and up through the middle of it—it was as much as half-after eight, then—here comes a raging rush of people with torches, and an awful whooping and yelling, and banging tin pans and blowing horns; and we jumped to one side to let them go by; and as they went by I see they had the king and the duke astraddle of a rail—that is, I knowed it was the king and the duke, though they was all over tar and feathers, and didn’t look like nothing in the world that was human—just looked like a couple of monstrous big soldier-plumes. Well, it made me sick to see it; and I was sorry for them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed like I couldn’t ever feel any hardness against them any more in the world. It was a dreadful thing to see. Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.

This finally closes the King and Duke episode.

We also learn that the dead man that Huck and Jim had encountered on the river, and that Jim had shielded from Huck, was Pap, so that closes that issue.

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Interlude: Earlier there had been a scene between Huck and Jim, touching on Jim’s family life. In stressing Jim’s essential humanity, it provides a foil for the episode that closes the book.

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Episode: “Saving” Jim; the final episode.

The remainder of the book is mostly taken up, after Huck is reunited with Tom Sawyer, with Tom’s elaborate plans for Jim’s escape. Typical of Tom, he turns it into an elaborate charade, an extended “trick.” Huck tries to argue that they should just do something quick and effective, but, as usual, Tom domineers. He is forcing Huck back into their old ways, before Huck’s “evolution.” Tom, though usually not intentionally cruel, is thoughtless and selfish, another kind of “warped” societal influence. He is unconcerned for Jim as a person seeking freedom; Jim is just a tool for fun.

As part of that fun, Tom convinces Huck to write “nonmous” letters in blood, warning the Phelps family that trouble is brewing, making escape a more dangerous, and thereore exciting, “game.” Tom’s machinations notwithstanding, Huck, Tom and Jim manage to escape. But as they go through a fence, Tom’s pant catches, and the sound it makes catches the attention of the group of men that had gathered at the Phelps’s in response to the “nonmous” letters, and one of the men starts shooting, hitting Tom in the leg. Tom wants to keep going, but Huck and Jim–in spite of the threat to a successful escape–insist on finding a doctor. Eventually the doctor returns with Tom, treated for his injury, and Jim is again imprisoned, in spite of the doctor’s praises .

It is painful to read of their–society’s–treatment of Jim. We see agiain what a kind, selfless, praisworthy man he is, someone who would be thoroughly admired if it weren’t for the color of his skin. Yet he is again imprisoned in a shed, chained, starved, and guarded, while not letting on that he even knows Huck or what they went through together.

Tom finally wakes up and gleefully recounts the boys’ adventure of freeing Jim, to which Aunt Sally responds,

For once, thankfully, even Tom’s sense of justice is aroused:

“But Tom is still Tom:

And Huck still retains some of his old self:

And his Aunt Polly she said Tom was right about old Miss Watson setting Jim free in her will; and so, sure enough, Tom Sawyer had gone and took all that trouble and bother to set a free nigger free! and I couldn’t ever understand before, until that minute and that talk, how he could  help a body set a nigger free with his bringing-up.

Jim is finally set free:

All is resolved (except, of course, the people who died or suffered during the “adventures”), and we learn, with attendant hope, that Huck’s triumphant “sound heart” that “defeated” society’s “deforming conscience” continues to beat within him:

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You can find the complete novel online here-> https://www.gutenberg.org/files/76/76-h/76-h

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1. both a literary device and a genre that uses exaggeration, humor, irony, or ridicule to highlight the flaws and absurdities of people and society ↩︎
2. dignity, seriousness, or solemnity of manner ↩︎
3. OK, the elephant in the room. It would be dishonest of Twain to avoid this epithet because that is how Huck and other white people thought of and referred to Blacks/slaves. It indicates a condescending, dismissive, callow attitude toward those who are considered nothing more than property. That mindset, produced by consciences deformed by white “sivilization,” becomes the major foil to Huck’s innately kind heart, and his struggle to reconcile the two. ↩︎
4.  a satirical, and episodic genre of fiction featuring a low-born, roguish hero who relies on wit rather than morality to survive in a corrupt society. The protagonist…moves through different social classes, highlighting societal hypocrisy. ↩︎
5. The Western Frontier, not yet “sivilized,” where Huck can continue to grow without “deformity.” ↩︎

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