Reviews - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

5.26k reviews for:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Raymond Burns, Mark Twain, Joanne Gise

3.51 AVERAGE

5.26k reviews for:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Raymond Burns, Mark Twain, Joanne Gise

3.51 AVERAGE

secret_service101's review against another edition

3.25

adventurous lighthearted medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

rprkrshearer's review against another edition

4.0

adventurous dark funny reflective tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

I’m reading this alongside James, by Percival Everett, because I don’t remember anything from it, and am really enjoying reading them side by side and comparing their respective narrative perspectives, and authorial choices. I will try to save my James review for James! As an isolated note, I love Judith Loftus, who helped Huck convincingly play female, all affirmation of his pursuit and condemnation of abuse. I also love how she said that men may think he was convincingly female, but I thought this was a really nice portrait of a woman being sharp, clever, resourceful, intelligent, and understanding, not pearl clutching, doting, and insipid as many women of the era were characterized. In fact, Mary Jane and her sisters were also extremely discerning, clever, and adaptable amid the hoodwinking they were exposed to by the duke and the king. Many women in this book are really round, emphatic, intelligent women, who have preserved their good hearts besides. Though there is more to be asked of the depths of those hearts for matriarchs and caregivers like Miss Watson,

even amid her final act of kindness,

, and Mrs. Phelps, who cares so deeply about Huck and Tom, and her own kids, but whose estimation of Black people is, like most others’ of the time, fully conditional on their obedience. The way in which the average citizen, who perceives themself to be a good person, talks about Black people remains barbaric and dehumanizing throughout, in most cases (save maybe Mary Ann). Huck somewhat evolves in this, but really not much, as he doesn’t seem to think about the linguistic piece very much, even as his empathy for Black people, or at least Jim, grows throughout the events of the text.

When Jim tells Huck that he ran away from Miss Watson, and Huck swears not to tell, he digresses that he’d be called a dirty abolitionist if anyone knew, but he would commit to Jim’s confidence. I find that incredible, the conflation of moral degradation and supporting slavery abolition; although I guess even though God advocates for, even demands the freeing of slaves in Egypt through Moses in Exodus, it is generally okay with other slave holding later in the Bible. Yet people still resist and reject the term in the context of prison abolition, too, our modern day enslavement institution.

Also interesting to me are Huck’s meditations upon what it means to sin versus being a good person. He ponders at length about the so-called immorality of aiding Jim in pursuit of his freedom; even when Jim lays out his plan to buy his wife’s freedom, and then that each of them will buy the freedom of each of their two young children, Huck is worried about the family that he may be exploiting by depriving them of access to an enslaved person, rather than reacting to Jim revealing that he has an entire family, all of whom are currently enslaved, too. And yet when Jim describes how Huck is his best friend, his only friend, he veers wildly in the other direction towards his camaraderie with Jim, and how enabling his freedom actually feels like the right thing to do in his heart. I think that this disconnect makes sense in context (lamenting the deprivation of one family while not thinking about Jim’s family initially) because Huck is a child. Kids first see things and form opinions about things based entirely on their relationship to themselves; Huck empathizes with a white family because he was part of a white family, and recognizes that experience. But when Jim codifies the friendship between them, this is something that is directly Huck’s, a relationship that he actively participates in. This bond suddenly becomes more real than the hypothetical white family, or reinforcing the more abstract power and social dynamics that he observes and participates in normally. Because he’s a kid, because he’s been long indoctrinated in one way, and is now in a position of agency and autonomy, where he can make his own decisions, claim his own values, and discern his own moral code, he really struggles to reconcile his feelings with what society has long told him to be true, and from authority figures that he loved, like Miss Watson, the widow, and Judge Taylor. It is difficult for a child to reconcile the thought, these people love me, and these people hurt somebody else who loves me. He has these wonderful moments that are so childlike, like when he and Jim lay out at night on the river under the stars, and ponder whether or not they were made by something because of their multitude, or if, as Jim suggests, they were laid by the moon; that the fallen ones got too spoiled, and were cast from the net toward earth. And yet he also has to negotiate his understanding of the hierarchy of power and authority, white supremacy and enslavement, poverty and religion, throughout his adventure, which at sometimes may seem like a big ask for a child. However, when we think about why this book is banned (most frequently because it uses the N-word over 200 times), I think it is actually because it gives us a main character who is is a young person, who shows himself to be highly capable of forging a moral compass outside of the societal impositions of the time. He chooses condemnation to hell, which he deeply fears, because he cannot abandon the insistence within him that he needs to help Jim, because he’s his friend. He forgoes the concept of heaven that is so deeply prescribed because of that relationship, and if a child can do that all on his own, that’s what makes the book powerful and threatening to all those who fear the capacity of a child’s empathy in confronting the social order. When we think about opt-out laws that have recently passed in some states, allowing parents to opt their children out of exposure to stories that simply feature queer characters (not even employ a queer storyline, just have discernibly queer people in them) in the name of “protecting” them, it just seems so clear that all of these acts are in service of protecting the hierarchy. This is something that Huck comes to see, too.

As another aside, the bit with the king and the duke where the latter recites “Hamlet’s” soliloquy was hilarious, maybe because I’m an English teacher; what a great joke. I did think it was fascinating that when the duke and the king finally get their comeuppance, Huck’s boundless empathy extends to them, too. He remarks that human being can be really cruel. There are multiple instances wherein communities that Huck visits cohere in a mass, and try to take action, and often that action is in the name of great generosity or great violence. One character remarks at the fore of one such gathering, “The average man’s a coward… Your newspapers call you a brave people so much that you think you are braver than any other people—whereas you’re just as brave, and no braver.” I found this very resonant through to our time today. Whereas when Tom Sawyer re-emerges in the narrative, and commits to helping Huck free Jim with no more explanation than, “don’t you think I know what I’m about?” the true power of personal conviction surpassing mob mentality is driven home for Huck.

Though Tom’s Quixote-esque commitment to adventure in helping Jim escape in the most unnecessary and laborious ways possible was genuinely exhausting. It felt so needlessly long. How do none of these adults perceive that all their strange happenings coincide with the two boys’ arrival at their farm? And poor Jim, what a freaking nightmare. To necessary have the patience of a saint for three needless weeks? Give the man an award (in addition, obviously, to his long awaited freedom).

For all this to go on for so long, the plot to ultimately fail, and then for Jim to be freed in Miss Watson’s will, was kind of a steamroll at the end.

Tom Sawyer may be a well-read, innovative kid, but he is exacerbating compared to Huck. I couldn’t help but root for this kid (Huck) because he has a deep heart.

In Jim’s freedom, and the knowledge of the death of his abusive, alcoholic father, and even Miss Watson’s death, in some ways, he too, is freed.

In his parting from us, the reader, he vows to continue his adventure unbowed from domestication, and one hopes that amid that pursuit, his mind can only continue to expand.

pshah5473's review against another edition

3.75

adventurous medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

elbarto's review against another edition

4.0

adventurous challenging emotional funny inspiring lighthearted reflective medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Pleased to re-read this as an adult and find it interesting and impressive still. Putting aside for a moment the treatment of race and class, from a purely linguistic standpoint, this book is a towering triumph. Few are the books written in the 19th century that can be read so easily and with such vividness to modern ears. That's really something. It's also pretty funny a lot of the time. As for the contentious treatment of race and class, I won't go too deep into well worn territory others better equipped than myself have delved into for decades just for a review no one will read :) but I'll say this: I re read Huck Finn to prep for Percival Everett's James which I'm excited to take on. I think that the failings and successes Twain laid out here will prove fertile ground for an account of the same narrative from the most interesting perspective available. I think the chances for a much better ending are pretty high, too.

Now some hottakes.

My wife mentioned Hemingway said Twain didn't know how to write an ending. It's true here. The last 60ish pages starting with the appearance of Tom Sawyer are not good.

Quite convenient that Jim gets mixed up with relatives of Sawyer, that move takes all the air out of the tires vis a vis tension since Huck no longer has to lie his face off with fear of real consequence. Almost felt like Twain didn't think he could keep it up himself. Sawyer adds nothing, only distracts from the main narrative. The king and the duke disappear and barely get a resolution. Instead the reader has to endure a bunch of intentional nonsense because of Tom until we get to the happy ending. I'm not against a happy ending here but it felt weak. Jim's fate is determined almost as an afterthought. Huck and Tom face no consequences. Worst of all, Twain misses a great opportunity to play with the wonderful tension in Huck's internal conflict where at earlier times in the book he wrestles with his desire to do 'right', which he sees as turning Jim in, despite not wanting to for personal reasons of loyalty he judges as 'wrong'. That is a great place to work from! I don't need Huck at the end to reverse his opinion but it would've been smart if Twain called that back and had Huck pontificate on the matter at the end of the adventure.

Did Twain think he would've been criticized for omitting his former titular character?

He seemed to be caught between writing a YA novel and one for an adult audience. Perhaps he realized too late that he had a bonafide book on his hands, more sophisticated than his previous novel for children, and failed to make the full adjustment the way Tolkien managed jumping up from The Hobbit to LOTR.