XII. Huck Finn

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

A Boxful of character

Now that you have read most of the novel, you should know the various characters pretty well. Therefore, if you had to compile a character’s personality into one box, what items would you put in the box?

What is a life box? A life box is a container of carefully chosen items that represent a particular character in a novel, in this case, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Directions:

Create a life box for one character in Huck Finn. The box must be decorated on the outside, as fitting the character. The box must contain six to eight items the character might use daily or have as a keepsake.

You must, however, justify your items. In addition to the items in the box, you must present a written explanation as to why you have chosen this particular item to represent your character.

Requirements for Written Explanation:

1) Write the explanation of each item on one side of an individual index card.

2) Find a direct quotation from the novel that justifies your choice of item. Write this direct textual evidence on the other side of the individual index card.

Due Date: Monday, December 15th

Assessment:

1. Did the student find six to eight items?

2. Did the items represent the character appropriately?

3. Did the student support his/her choices with textual support?

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A brief History of the “N” Word

*History often traced to the Latin word “niger,” meaning “black”.

*Became the noun “negro” (black person) in English.

*Probable that “nigger” is a phonetic spelling of the white Southern mispronounciation of “negro.”

*Early 1800s: firmly established as a degenerative nickname.

*21st century: remains a principal symbol of white racism regardless of who is using it.

*Historically, “nigger” defined, limited, made fun of, and ridiculed all blacks.

*Although nigger has been used to refer to any person of known African ancestry, it is usually directed against blacks who supposedly have certain negative characteristics.

*Use of “nigger” by African Americans:

*argument is that the word has to be understood in its situation, that repeated use of the word by blacks will make it less offensive;

*not really the same word b/c whites are saying “nigger” but blacks are saying “niggah”;

*also, it is just a word and blacks should not be prisoners of the past or the ugly words that originated from the past;

*within the African-American community, the word and its derivations can be used to denote affection, camaraderie, power, and disdain.

*Randall Kennedy argues that the word nigger should be usable by all people as long as no one is being harmed. “There is nothing necessarily wrong with a white person saying nigger, just like there is nothing necessarily wrong with a black person saying it. What should matter is the context in which the word is spoken.”

*“Only when African Americans stand up and demand that their own culture stops using the word in any context, will they have the moral authority to insist that the word not be used anywhere else, by anyone else.”

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Conflict in Huckleberry Finn

The first chapters of a novel usually introduce readers to the conflicts, or struggles that the characters will face throughout the course of the story. EXTERNAL CONFLICTS are struggles between characters who have different goals or between a character and forces of nature. INTERNAL CONFLICTS are psychological struggles that characters experience when they are unhappy or face difficult decisions. EXTERNAL CONFLICTS can often trigger INTERNAL CONFLICTS.

Directions: Using the first ten chapters of Huck Finn, think over all of the conflicts presented, both external and internal and fill out the chart below. You must have AT LEAST 5 conflicts. If you find more, use the back of this sheet to document them. Be sure that you are clear in your explanation of the conflict in order to receive full credit!

1. ______vs. ______

Explanation of conflict:

2. ______vs. ______

Explanation of conflict:

3. ______vs. ______

Explanation of conflict:

4. ______vs. ______

Explanation of conflict:

5. ______vs. ______

Explanation of conflict:

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Consider the following things as you read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

1. Setting of novel: Mississippi River Valley from St. Petersburg, Missouri to St. Louis.

2. Point of view: Told in first person point of view from the eyes of Huck.

3. Time period: Around 1840 (thus, pre-Civil War).

4. Should we take Twain at his word when he tells us, at the beginning of the novel, “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot”?

5. Is this novel a book that can only be read and enjoyed by children? What are its elements that make it a good child’s adventure story?

6. What are the elements in this novel that make it decidedly not for children?

7. Why is Twain’s depiction of Jim so controversial?

8. Analyze the different ways Twain uses humor in this novel and then consider its purpose and effectiveness in this novel.

9. Examine the structure (the pattern of organization involving the sequence of events) of this novel. What does Huck’s alternation between the land and the water represent or symbolize.

10. Speculate about reasons why Twain had so much difficulty completing this book (begun in 1876, it was finally finished in 1884—at one point, Twain was desperate enough to consider killing Huck off via a steamboat accident).

11. Why did Ernest Hemingway, among others, admire this novel so much? According to Ernest Hemingway, it was the "one book" from which "all modern American literature" came, and contemporary critics and scholars have treated it as one of the greatest American works of art.

12. HF as an initiation story?

13. Note all the examples of lies, games, tricks, and deceptions that proliferate in this work.

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Do the right thing:

Huck and morality

Huck’s sense of morality in the book at times seems quite flexible. He tells fibs on occasion and, indeed, seems to think that the occasional “stretcher” is ok. At the same time, he believes his word is his bond.

Throughout the novel, Huck is troubled by the tensions between what society tells him is “right” and his own sense of morality—his conscience. In this exercise, you will closely analyze Huck’s behavior throughout the first 15 chapters of the novel in order to better understand his moral choices and conflicts.

Directions: For the following statements, find AT LEAST TWO SPECIFIC EXAMPLES from Chapters 1-15.

1. find two examples of huck fibbing, fudging, or exaggerating the truth:

2. Find two examples of huck obeying social conventions and authority:

3. find two examples of huck disobeying social conventions and authority:

4. find two examples of huck doing the “right” thing:

5. find two examples of huck doing the “wrong” thing:

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Huck finn

Mini-research project

Due: thursday, dec. 4th

Many literary critics have, throughout the years, discussed the function of the Duke/King episode in Huck Finn. While some critics say that the episode detracts from the main storyline of Huck and Jim, other critics argue that it plays a pivotal role in the book as a whole.

In this assignment, you are going to do a bit of research into the function of the Duke/King episode in Huck Finn. Here are some questions that need to be addressed in this “mini-research project”:

1. What aspect of human nature does Twain criticize through the Sherburn-Boggs fight and aftermath?

2. What is Twain implying about human nature through the advertising for the “Royal Nonesuch” (the second play)?

3. Why is Huck's response to the Wilks family con so strong in Chapter XXIV (24)? Why does Huck make moral evaluations now (you'll recall that he remained morally neutral concerning the prior schemes of the duke and king)?

4. What function does the Duke/King section serve to the novel as a whole? Why did Twain include them in his book?

Using the Internet (or any other outside research tool), investigate these questions, and in a well-written paragraph, give a summary of HOW and WHY the Duke/King episode is important to the novel as a whole according to the information you have found. The paragraph must be AT LEAST ½ pages long and must be TYPED!

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To many Americans, Mark Twain’s book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is considered a classic and is read in classrooms as a rite of passage for growing up. Written in 1884, Twain tells the childhood adventure of Huck Finn, a white boy who has no family and a great deal of money. In a turn of events, he runs away down the Mississippi River with an escaped slave, Jim. The two form a bond and learn about growing up, adventure, conscience and loyalty. Some say, however, that a better ending to the story could have been written and that the ending was a failure on Twain’s part. This essay will argue that the ending was indeed, a failure, and show the reasons why.

Twain’s failure is argued by author Ernest Hemingway. He felt the ending of Huck Finn was “cheating.” His reasoning comes from two facts; one, it was a not a realistic ending. The fact that Huck and Jim just happen to come to the farm and meet up with the family that was related to Tom Sawyer is not realistic and would have been nearly impossible to coincidentally find a family that Tom knew on the huge area of the Mississippi River.

The other reason Hemingway thought the ending was a failure was that Tom Sawyer stepped in during the last eight chapters, saved the day and brushed Huck and Jim out of the way. Their friendship took back seat to all the work, cruel scheming and adventuring that Tom was planning for Jim’s escape from the Phelps plantation. This was a “cop-out” to some who felt Jim and Huck could have been further developed in that time.

Hemingway, along with others, felt the ending took away from the main point of the book, the moral and ethical responsibilities of people and as a coming of age story. Tom Sawyer simply takes the story back to the “non-story” which was the book, Tom Sawyer, a plain adventure book that had no ethical undertones, as Huck Finn did. Huck was a moral voice and the story delved deeper into emotion and made the reader think about issues more serious than what steamboat to get on and which house to rob.

Another writer David Bradley felt that, like Hemingway, there were problems with Twain’s ending like why no one in America has been able “to suggest-- much less write... a better ending as he did or write any ending at all” for Huck Finn besides the one Twain came up with. Experts in literature and others feel that there is an explanation for this. Twain writes in the ending that Jim is freed in Miss Watson’s will and that Huck is free from the grasp of his terrible father’s beatings. This freedom causes two questions to be raised: why is Tom so cruel in his part of Jim’s escape and what was Huck really running from- his father or from society?

The reason these questions will never be answered and why there will never be a better ending is because America as a society has never been able to rise above social classes and their given upbringings and that America has not yet become sophisticated enough to deal with the role of slavery in American history and to rise above it.

American society is partly at blame for this problem. As youngsters, many are taught to go with what their parents have taught them and to act the way they were raised. Tom was raised with a family who supported him and a decent household. Though he had this background, that didn’t stop him from taking advantage of people and being cruel for fun. Huck was raised in a totally opposite household that had practically no morals, and yet he turned out better than Tom did. With the type of language and ideals Pap placed in Huck’s mind, it’s amazing he was able to act with the convictions he did.

America will never be able to come into the mind set of its best and moral citizens, like Jim, who was willing to be different to get his point across. Though relationships and helping Huck was probably a taboo subject, Jim did what he had to do to get free and help Huck to do the same. This difference was evidence that Jim had more moral character than any of his white counterparts. Other people, like Huck’s Pap, were the bad part of society that was against slaves receiving rights and getting anything more or the same that white people received. Pap’s uneducated attitude was the type of behavior that shows that white people may not always be correct and his idea that he was smarter than any black person was wrong. His mind frame was reason that slavery continued as long as it did.

In the case of Miss Watson, she was a good and moral enough woman to free her slave after she was dead, but not quite ethical enough to mind owning slaves. She was a person who chose not to have to deal with her values while she was alive, but took the easy road and had no questions to answer to those who objected to it. Her heart was in the right place in freeing Jim, but she was still a slave owner and that was the matter at hand. It was her dilemma to think Jim ran away because of her, but yet, she thought nothing of tearing apart Jim’s family while he was her slave.

Something of significance that Twain put in the end of the book was that Miss Watson was truly sorry for not freeing Jim earlier: “Old Miss Watson died two months ago, and she was ashamed she ever was going to sell him down the river, and said so, and set him free in her will ” (317). This showed that Jim’s freedom was a moral issue that was to be taken care of and meant something to her. Obviously Miss Watson did care for Jim, but she chose to go with the norm of society and try to do what people around her would accept her. This may not be what all Americans did, but it many people, like Miss Watson, wait until it is too late to take responsibility for their actions so they won’t have to deal with it. Her lapse in character was part of Twain’s failure.