The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

There are several deaths throughout The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The first one would be the symbolic death of Huck. Huck fakes his death to get away from Pap and is metaphorically reborn on...

Another conflict occurs when Huck and Jim stumble across a wrecked steam boat during a storm in chapter 12. The first external conflict in this scene is the physical storm that is creating chaos...

As was mentioned in the previous post, Huck and Tom devise different plans to free Jim beginning in Chapter 34. Before Huck even begins to think of his plan, he knows that they will end up...

At the beginning of chapter 10, Huck tells Jim that he does not believe in bad luck. He tells Jim, “What did you say when I fetched in the snake-skin I found on top of the ridge day before...

For Huck Finn, "civilization" represents the mores of the slave-owning society that he thinks he should follow but that he can't actually follow. Huck is hard on himself for not being able to abide...

Mark Twain had already used Huckleberry Finn as a character in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which is a children's book narrated by an omniscient adult. It is an interesting choice, therefore, to...

How can you narrow it down??! Well, the conflict of social inequity is certainly at the forefront of this novel. The theme of justice certainly ties into this, as well. The Widow Douglas tries to...

Mark Twain uses several examples of hyperbole in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to exaggerate a feeling so that it has an effect on the reader. Hyperbole is often used to dramatize a situation....

Huckleberry Finn has a three-part narrative structure. The first eleven chapters take place in or around "civilization," which is represented by the world of St. Petersburg, Missouri. These...

Huck is a young and naive protagonist. Like satirists before him, most notably Swift and Voltaire, Twain uses a naive character who initially buys unthinkingly into what his warped social order...

One of the most prominent of Huck's lies occurs when he fakes his own death to escape from Pap Finn, who would otherwise ruin Huck's life. It is a justifiable lie because Pap is a hopeless...

In Chapter Eight of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck bumps into Jim on his fourth day on the island. Although Jim initially thinks that Huck is a ghost, he is eventually able to settle down...

Huck is not at all fond of religion.  In the first chapter of the novel, he tells how Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas are constantly bombarding him with do's and don'ts and attaching...

Tom and Huck are similar in several ways. Both boys love adventure, although while Tom experiences adventure through his imagination that comes from romantic novels, Huck, a realist, lives his...

At the beginning of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck narrates that after the events in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the Widow Douglas takes him in, treats him like her own son, and tries...

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a complex work, regarded by many as the greatest American novel. Twain employs the protagonist as an innocent but thoughtful and often incredulous commentator...

The feud and the star-cross'd lovers subplot are meant to be reminiscent of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, where the two noble families, the Montagues and the Capulets, fight and kill one another...

The Grangerfords' house is a grand, stately pile, the epitome of gracious Southern living. Huck's never seen anything quite like it. It's a large house with several acres of land, worked by over a...

In chapter eight, Jim confesses to Huck that he has "run off." Though Huck is initially shocked, he agrees to listen to Jim without telling on him. Huck reassures Jim that "people would call me a...

One of the similarities between the two is that they both feel free out there in the great outdoors. Huck has never known anything else in life; since he was knee-high to a grasshopper he's had to...

Here are a few more examples of literary devices in these two chapters: Simile: The king is described as being "as splendid as a rainbow" in chapter 23. The simile establishes a comparison between...

Another way that Huck grows throughout the novel is in his views on society and being 'civilized'. At the beginning of the novel, Huck's objections to society revolve mainly around things like...

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, written by Mark Twain, is a story full of symbolism. The story is about a young boy named Huckleberry Finn who comes from a rough family. His father is an...

We're not told specifically how Jim's story of 'Lizabeth changes Huck's view of Jim. The story Jim tells is about his daughter 'Lizabeth recovering after a bout of scarlet fever. Jim gets angry at...

The Duke and King are trying to increase spectators to their theatrical productions. After poor turnout to their badly performed Shakespeare Recitation, the Duke decides that what these...

A great scene that helps us to characterize Jim. Jim's hairball (according to Jim) works like a magic ball - it tells the future. Of course, it only tells the future if it is first provided some...

Huck has been brought up to believe that certain actions are moral and true while others are not. His culture believed (mostly) that slaves were inferior and that they should be kept instead of...

Huck's crisis could be summed up as his natural sense of decency and morality colliding with conventional southern moral teachings. Conventional morality, buttressed as Huck understands it, by the...

Huck tells many lies (often through instantly made-up stories) throughout Huckleberry Finn. Early in the novel, he dresses up like a girl and talks with a woman he does not know in order to get an...

I'm guessing that your question is prompted by all the time that Huck and Jim spend naked on the raft together. You may also be puzzled by the term of endearment, "honey," that Jim uses towards...

Huck matures through facing the moral dilemma of whether he should help Jim escape slavery. All his life, Huck's society has taught him the warped morality that helping a slave escape is a great...

As stated in other answers, Huck fakes his death in order to escape his abusive father and also to escape the whole society of St Petersburg which he finds oppressive: indeed, repressive. From the...

Cairo, Illinois, is freedom for Jim. This river is at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. So, since Huck and Jim have no choice but to travel south, Cairo is the farthest south that...

All great writers give careful thought to naming their characters, though how Mark Twain decided upon Huckleberry Finn is not known for certain. What is known is that Twain had to rename a...

I think the following points of comparison are significant: Both are very superstitious - which connects them in some ways, provides conflict at other times. Both are running away and hiding in the...

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain is satirizing both the greed of the king and the duke as they come up with more and more scams to make money and the gullibility and cruelty of the...

Mary Jane is one of the three orphaned Wilks sisters; the others are Susan and Joanna. While traveling with the King and the Duke, Huck learns about the death of the Wilks sisters' father. Huck,...

Beside being a satire on frontier feuds, many critics also see this episode as a commentary on the youths that died needlessly during the civil war. The Grangerfords and Sheperdsons have been...

Huck's attitude towards Jim at the beginning of the novel is, what seems to us, rather harsh and racist. He thinks that Jim is less than a man, ignorant, without real feelings, and property to be...

Fog is an interesting weather feature. In simplest terms, it is a cloud at ground level. That shouldn't be scary or ominous. Most people remember times when they looked up into the sky and imagined...

Huckleberry Finn matures after he runs away and travels down the Mississippi River with the escaped slave named Jim. Huck learns to fear and distrust society as he witnesses the evil that men...

With the work of Emmeline Grangerford, Twain satirizes Gothic, Romantic literature. It is fair to say that Emmeline's subject matter suggests an obsession with death and borders on the macabre, not...

In many ways, the character of Huck Finn is the embodiment of the American spirit. Americans are famous for their penchant to dream big and act on attaining those dreams. Huck is very much a...

Jim is portrayed as being very unintelligent through the first third of the novel. The trick that Tom and Huck play on Jim is thoroughly stereotypical as is Jim's assertion of his knowledge of the...

As Huck ruminates over whether he should turn Jim in for being a runaway slave, he decides he can't. In the world in which he has been raised, he has been taught that helping a slave escape is a...

When Huck and Jim team up on Jackson’s Island (1), little do they know where their travels will take them. But when they hear that there are bounty hunters trying to capture Jim, Huck and Jim...