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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

by Mark Twain

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What is the climax of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?  

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The climax of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn involves a convoluted plan to secure Jim's freedom. After learning Jim is being held at the Phelps' house, Tom comes up with a plan to save him. He has Huck pose as Tom, and then Tom poses as his own brother, Sid. Huck suggests they find the keys to set Jim free, but Tom insists upon a plan involving journals, digging tunnels, and other far-fetched steps he's read in adventure novels.

When they finally get Jim out, Tom ends up getting shot by mistake. After being injured, he reveals that Jim was free all along: Jim's mistress, Miss Watson, set him free in her will. Now that she is dead, Jim is no longer anyone's slave.

The most humorous aspect of this is that Tom's plan is overly complicated and needless. Tom seeks to live out the escapist adventures he reads in novels, so he takes advantage of Jim's perilous situation for his own gratification. Twain is both parodying other adventure novels and exploiting Tom's own comedic flaws, namely his selfishness.

However, some might argue the true climax of the novel is when Huck decides not to tell Miss Watson where Jim is. He has been taught that there is nothing wrong with slavery and that keeping Jim from being rediscovered by his mistress is not only illegal but a sin.

When he tears up the letter sharing Jim's whereabouts to Miss Watson, claiming he's fine with "[going] to hell" to keep Jim free, Huck matures as a person. In many ways, that scene is the emotional climax of the story, because Huck finally comes into his own, rejecting a social rule that makes no sense to him anymore.

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The book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn comes to its climax when the Huckleberry and his friend Tom Sawyer have to rescue Jim from the Phelps family, who have taken him as a slave. Huckleberry shows up pretending to be Tom, who is in fact, a distant relative of the Phelps, and Tom arrives and pretends to be his own brother, Sid.

Huckleberry comes up with a harebrained scheme to get everyone out of the Phelps family's grasp, and the three run off, with Tom getting injured in the leg during the pursuit. Fortunately, that is the worst of the damage, and it is revealed that Jim is, in fact, a free man after the death of his former owner. Having come to a satisfying conclusion, Huckleberry and Tom plan another wild adventure, and Jim heads off as a free man.

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The climax of the novel comes when the two boys, Huckleberry and Tom Sawyer, have freed themselves from the greedy and conniving Duke and King but now must rescue Jim, who has been sold to another family as a slave. In order to convince the Phelps family to accept them, the two boys pretend to be distant relatives of the family (Huck pretends to be Tom Sawyer, in fact, since he is...

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a distant relative, and Tom acts as his made-up brother).

The two help Jim escape and make it out of the Phelps's home safely (albeit battered a bit), and they learn that Jim has been granted his freedom. In the end, the harebrained scheme works, and the novel comes out to a satisfying conclusion.

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The climax of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn comes in the final chapters of the novel. After finally ridding themselves of the king and the duke, Huck still has to rescue Jim, who has been sold to the Phelps family. When Huck arrives at the Phelps', it turns out they are relatives of Tom Sawyer and mistake Huck for Tom, coming for a visit. Tom shows up later that day, and he pretends to be his own brother, Sid. Huck and Tom decide to rescue Jim, but Tom's form of escape is a complicated one, modeled on stories he has read. In the process, Tom is wounded in the leg and Huck and Jim are caught. But the wounded Tom has news: Miss Watson, Jim's owner, has died and has made Jim a free man in her will. Aunt Polly shows up next, and the boys' true identities are made known to the Phelps'. Though Huck is not happy with Tom's deception about Jim's newly found freedom, all ends happily. Tom has had the adventure of the escape, Jim is free, and Huck finds out his mean old Pap is dead. The story ends with Huck planning a new adventure down river.

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