Author’s Choices in an Extended Text:
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Unit Essential Question:

What knowledge of the author should readers consider when reading an extended text?

Key Learning:

Knowledge of an author’s audience, purpose, craft, and historical context impact how a reader understands an extended text.

Focused Learning Concepts

Integration of Knowledge and Ideas

  • Demonstrate [background] knowledge of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early-twentieth-century foundational works of American literature (CCSS: RSL #9)

Key Ideas and Details

  • Analyze the impact of author’s choices regarding how to develop and relate elements of a story (e.g. where a story is set, how the action is ordered, how the characters are introduced and developed). (CCSS: RSL #3)
  • Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account. (CCSS: RSL #2)

Craft and Structure

  • Analyze how an author’s choices concerning how to structure specific parts of a text contribute to its overall structure and meaning. (CCSS: RSL #5)
  • Analyze a case in which grasping point of view requires distinguishing between what is directly stated in the text from what is really meant (e.g. satire, irony) (CCSS: RSL #6)

Integration of Knowledge and Ideas

  • Analyze multiple interpretations of a story, drama, or poem (e.g., recorded or live production of a play or recorded novel or poetry), evaluating how each version interprets the source text. (CCSS: RSL #7)

Literary Terms:

  • Bildungsroman
  • Biographical Lens
  • Characterization
  • Conflict
  • Dialect
  • Episodic Novel
  • Foil
  • Great American Novel
  • Historical Context
  • Irony
  • Local Color Realism
  • Point of View
  • Purpose
  • Romanticism
  • Realism
  • Regionalism
  • Satire
  • Setting
  • Social Commentary
  • Source Text
  • Symbol
  • Theme Statement

Thematic Stems:

  • Human Nature
  • Romantic Adventure
  • Race Relations
  • Freedom
  • Government
  • Religion

As you read, take note of the elements of storytelling in the novel:

Story Elements:

  • Setting/Dialect—specific attention to regionalism/verisimilitude
  • Plot—specific attention to episodic structure
  • Characterization—specific attention to Huck, Tom, Jim
  • Point of View/Narrator
  • Social Commentary (Satire)
  • Theme Development

Also, consider the following information:

Setting vs. Context

Setting includes the time, location, and everything in which a story takes place, and initiates the main backdrop and mood for a story.

Context includes the set of facts or circumstances that surround a situation or event (such as a book’s publication); such as "the historical context."

Take note that the setting and context of the novel differ. How does this impact how you read the novel?

Episodic Novel

An episodic novel is a narrative composed of loosely connected incidents, each one more or less self-contained, often connected by a central character or characters. It is one way of constructing a plot. As you read the novel, pause at the end of each episode and review key points:

  1. Who is in the episode?
  2. What happens throughout the episode?
  3. Where does the episode take place in the novel (setting, page number)?
  4. When does the episode take place in the novel (previous episode, following episode)?
  5. Why does Mark Twain include this episode in the novel (connect to social commentary, theme development)?

Bildungsroman(achieved through characterization of Huck, Jim, and Tom)

The German word Bildungsroman means "a novel of formation":a novel of someone's growth from childhood to maturity.

Point of View

Point of view is the relationship of the narrator, or storyteller, to the events of the story. Huckleberry Finn is told by the character Huck, using words like I and we. Therefore, it is told from the first-person point of view. The reader sees everything through Huck’s eyes and is given his perspective on events.

When examining a narrative point of view, it is important to distinguish the narrator from the author. Huck is an uneducated fourteen-year-old boy living in a village in the 1840s. He has the knowledge, beliefs, and experiences of such a boy. Twain, on the other hand, was a well-traveled writer and experienced lecturer. He was well aware of how to use narrative techniques, adopt different points of view, and speak in the role of different characters, and he used that knowledge to create a narrator who is very different from himself.

Unreliable Narrator

Huckleberry Finn is also an example of an unreliable narrator—one who does not understand the full significance of the events he describes and comments on. Huck is not intentionally unreliable; his lack of education and experience makes him so. Much of the humor in the first chapters comes from Huck’s incomplete understanding of the adults around him and their “sivilized” ways.

Satire

Satire is a kind of literature that tries to open people’s eyes to the need for change by exposing the flaws of a person or society. Satirists’ main weapon is humor, which is created through techniques such as irony.

Themes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. Look at the theme stems on the overview and consider how the literary elements in the novel interact to develop a theme statement. The point to remember is that a subject is not a theme: a subject is often a topic examined by the work. A theme is a statement, direct or implied, about the subject/topic that can be supported with direct quotes from the novel and reader analysis.