Tatyana Sverbilova
Samuel Clemens, the future writer Mark Twain, spent his childhood in the town of Hannibal on the Mississippi, whose features can be recognized in St. Petersburg, where he settled his heroes Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. The town was located on the border of the slave zone - the state of Illinois on the other side of the Mississippi was already free. The biography of Mark Twain can be considered more fascinating than any of his books: a young pilot on the Mississippi (hence his literary pseudonym: in pilotage jargon it means “mark two” - this is the mark of the lot - the rope for measuring depth - was considered safe for the passage of ships), a Confederate during Civil War(that is, fighting on the side of the southerners), a prospector (seeker of silver or gold) in Nevada, a journalist in Virginia City.
A bright future was predicted for the young comedian. The young writer’s first big book, “Simps Abroad,” was published in 1867. At the turn of the 80s, a provincial journalist became a world famous writer. He is perceived as an artistic symbol of America. But gradually a crisis is brewing in the writer’s mind: the former humorist begins to perceive reality as an object of total satirical negation, causing deep pessimism that extends to humans. “What is Man” is the title of his bleak philosophical treatise of 1906, published anonymously. Only recently did his latest philosophical story, “The Mysterious Stranger,” become known, in which all that was left of the former author Tom Sawyer was a group of boy heroes, and even then in the Middle Ages, and even then in a foreign country.
The Mississippi Trilogy as an Epic folk life and the highest achievement of American realism was left behind (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). Twain at the beginning of the 20th century is approaching the artistic discoveries of the new century, inevitably associated with the artist’s tragic worldview. For some reason, we only remember the cheerful author Tom Sawyer.
The writer's first humorous stories in the genre reproduce the grotesque fables of the folklore of the frontier - that moving conventional border line between the East - the habitable space of the first settlers of America - the pioneers - and the unknown West, where the alien civilization was spreading. Frontier culture is one of the national characteristics of the United States that is absent in other - traditional - cultures. Unreliability is the main property of frontier tales, where pioneer heroes were endowed with fantastic ingenuity, strength and a sense of justice. The moral ideal of the frontier is the educational idea of the triumph of reason and common sense, based on the recognition of the natural equality of people. And this is the original democracy of American culture. The culture of the frontier reflects a reality that has not yet been established, where a person is forced to rely only on his common sense. These are Mark Twain’s “simpletons”, people who are not very educated, but endowed with an unshakable faith in the future.
“The Famous Jumping Frog of Calaveras” presents a seemingly incredible fact: frog races, or rather races, where the “favorite” is stuffed with shot so that she disgraces herself. However, this incredible fact is included in a whole cascade of similar facts that are presented by the narrator as reliable. This creates a ghostly reality where anything can happen. For example, the owner of the ill-fated frog previously had a puppy who always won dog fights due to the fact that he grabbed the opponent’s hind leg. But one day his ill-wishers handed him a dog without hind legs, he became confused, lost and died of frustration. The grotesqueness of frontier fables, brilliantly stylized by Mark Twain, ultimately goes back to the carnival type of culture that we see in both Rabelais and Gogol.
But, of course, Mark Twain is, first and foremost, a trilogy about Mississippi. In its first part - “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” - the author decided to show the respectable patriarchal idyll of old times, when relations between people were not yet measured by the purity of the “Gilded Age”. However, the quiet life of a small provincial town, where children turn life into an endless game, is distinguished by a fair amount of lack of spirituality and melancholy. Of course, we understand that these are parodies of the boring and didactic children's books that have always characterized Puritan culture. But in “Tom Sawyer”, a righteous life according to the natural impulses of the soul is naturally rewarded with a treasure that unexpectedly falls on the boys. That is, a certain didactics (moral teaching) is still present.
In Life on the Mississippi, and especially in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the picture of the world changes, increasingly loses its playful optimism and acquires universal tragic features. “Huck Finn” becomes a true national epic of American folk life, filled with a sense of tragedy. It was this book that was destined to become the main work of the writer.
The author's artistic discovery was that he gives the floor to his hero, Huck, who narrates the story in the first person. The hero's living word contributed to the fact that, among other things, this book became perhaps the first written in “American English”, with jargon, dialects, and irregularities.
American literary historians have viewed this novel as a road novel, or a river novel. The river takes on mythological significance as the river of life. Remember, for example, the image of the mysterious river that appears to little Paul Dombey in Dickens's novel. Researchers identified Huck's journey, accompanied by the black Jim, along the river with an initiation rite, that is, a ritual test of a boy for manhood. And at the same time, the river is a symbol of the spiritual quest of humanity, like the sea in Melville. This book has two levels of reading: at the level of the plot, as a story about the adventurous adventures of a boy and a runaway black man floating on a raft on a big river, and at the level of a myth about the search for one’s own identity, about the formation of a personality that tragically does not coincide with the generally accepted social ideal of personality independent and endlessly lonely. At the origins of such a plot is probably Odysseus-Ulysses, all of whose adventures ultimately boiled down to the desire to comprehend his own destiny, to finally find, in a cruel world where the inevitable will of providence reigns, his own path and his own refuge, the homeland of his soul, regardless of the storms and storms of the surrounding world. Let us remember that Odysseus was not destined to find peace when he finally returned to his home, Ithaca. By his highest will, he had to go on his travels again in order to finally find people who did not know the sea and navigation, and teach them everything that he himself knew, to convey the experience of travel. The ancients left us a strange saying: “It is necessary to sail on the sea, but to live is not so necessary.” Sailing on the sea means learning not only the world, but also oneself in this world, making a spiritual pilgrimage. And this is truly necessary.
The principles of myth can be recognized in the entire structure of Mark Twain’s novel, therefore ritual and mythological interpretations of this novel are still very popular among researchers to this day. So, for example, Huck, running away from his alcoholic father, who threatens him with death, stages his own murder, which, despite its complete absurdity, everyone believes. Mythological interpretations of the novel (the motive of liberation from the father) are complemented by existentialist interpretations of it: true liberation and gaining independence is possible only through the experience of death. The heroes of Homer and Virgil needed to descend into kingdom of the dead to find out the future, comprehend the true meaning of life and free yourself from misunderstanding the essence of your own disasters. Dante walked through the circles of Hell to understand history and himself. Huck Finn constantly encounters death in his existential journey. This is not the everyday authentic death of specific people, but a conditional, mythological death as such. Why?
Because traveling along the river does not provide the opportunity to stop for a long time in any place, to get to know people in detail, their psychology, does not provide the opportunity to establish more or less long-term connections, to become part of this world and, therefore, to perceive the death of this world as a variant of one’s own of death. After all, when people live with each other for a long time, the death of one is perceived as an irreparable loss. With Huck it’s different. He only manages to become attached to the people with whom fate confronts him, when the inexorable law of the river - the law of eternal parting - calls him further. He is only an observer, although sometimes he has the courage to intervene in events, although his fair intervention is not objectively required: justice is restored without him.
So; the complex intrigue with the gold in the coffin was actually not needed - after all, the real relatives of the late Wilkes could have proved their case without it. Likewise, Huck's decision to tear up the letter in which he gave Jim up to his mistress - given at the cost of painful moral hesitation and agreement to be a sinner for Jim's sake - was actually useless, since by that time Jim's mistress had already died and, in her will, had freed her runaway slave. But in myth, what is important is not the real causes and consequences of events, but their transformation in the mind of the main character. Although useless, independent decisions Huck testified to the completion of the formation of his personality as independent, independent - and lonely. On this path, the individual inevitably also encounters the birth of love.
If Twain's Tom Sawyer never becomes an adult and continues to turn his whole life into a game (it is not for nothing that the novel about Huck begins and ends with Tom's rather cruel games - from dispersing children in Sunday school to jokes with the exhausted Jim, to whom he does not tell about his real liberation - after all, children are sometimes cruel), then Huck, unlike him, matures in his wanderings.
By the way, how old is Huck Finn? There are hints in the text that he is thirteen or fourteen years old. But sometimes it seems to us that he has much more, because he solves “adult” existential questions. That’s why the childhood love of Tom Sawyer and Becky Thacher is so different from the completely adult feeling that Huck feels for Mary Jane, whom he wants to help with all his might. The basis of this love is respect and admiration for it. After all, Mary Jane is as unusual a girl as Huck is unusual. Tom is quite ordinary, despite his indefatigable imagination. “Say what you want,” Huck admires Mary Jane, “but she had, I think, much more character than any other girl; I think she was a real flint. [...] As soon as she walked out that door, I never saw her again, I never saw her! Well, I remembered about her many, many times, millions of times!” This fleeting love, which Mary Jane, who was older, may not have suspected, seems to Huck the only salvation from death in the terrible trouble that Huck finds himself in along with two swindlers - they are going to be lynched. And he, running away, looks back at the light in her window, knowing that he will never see anything like this again, and repeats again that she was better than everyone, and she had much more character than other girls. In the existential depth of myth, love is always true only when it is able to withstand death. Anything else is just child's play.
Just as fleetingly, Huck encounters death - he barely has time to notice - and again - the river of wanderings pulls him further. Therefore, death in this novel is not a psychological fact. Today we are no longer even so interested in whether it is a historical fact - whether in the 19th century in southern states A person’s life was valued so little - just barely - to immediately lynch him? After all, the phenomenon of death is included in the artistic structure of the novel, which can be read as a myth.
First, Huck needed the blood of a pig - a kind of sacrificial animal in mythology - to fake his own death. Then he and Jim find houseboat, where a dead body lies and Jim won't let Huck look at his face. And only on the last page of the novel does Jim admit that it was his father then. That is, complete liberation from the power of his father is completed only when Huck becomes an individual - independent and independent, running counter to the social ideal of life, with which he can never feel free.
Then Jim and Huck witness the bandits brutally massacre each other on a half-sunken ship and die in the wreckage. Then there is the story of a terrible vendetta in the Grangerford family, when in front of Huck his friend and brother-in-law Buck is brutally killed: “I felt so bad that I almost fell out of the tree. I won’t tell you everything, otherwise if I start, I’ll feel bad again. [...] All this is still before my eyes, I even dreamed about it many times. [...] When I covered Baku’s face, I even cried - after all, he was friends with me and was very kind to me.”
Then - an incident in the state of Arkansas, when in a small town Colonel Sherborn shoots a pathetic drunkard at point-blank range, who he was simply tired of, in front of the old man's sixteen-year-old meek daughter and disperses the townspeople who had gathered to lynch him.
Why does Huck go to the circus after these terrible events? Some researchers believe that at this moment he had not yet achieved the desired freedom and personal independence that he was heading towards. It can be explained another way. Circus is the art of acting, carnival, dressing up, transformation, metamorphosis, theatricalization of life. And one of the most important functions of theatrical art is overcoming the fear of death through play. After all, having beaten death, you seem to subjugate it to yourself and you will no longer be so afraid. Huck goes to the circus to overcome the horror of death he has just experienced.
And Huck himself is also constantly “acting a show,” sometimes of his own free will, sometimes obeying circumstances: he fakes his own death, dresses up as a girl, several times impersonates another boy, including an Englishman (which is especially funny), participates in stupid and Tom's cruel game with Jim takes the name Tom Sawyer. All his wanderings are permeated with carnival games. Therefore, it seems not surprising that the phenomenon of death in the novel is carnivalized. In Huck’s observation, the last death in the book also looks terribly grotesque: the swindlers King and Duke, rolled in tar and feathers and placed on a pole, who no longer even look like people, “just two of these huge lumps.” Huck does not have time to warn them about the danger... “People can be terribly cruel to each other,” concludes Huck, who is tormented by his conscience, although he is not to blame.
Huck is not like the people he has to live with. He cannot adapt to their life, because behind the external comfort and coziness the face of death is visible everywhere. He gets into different houses and to different families. But everywhere it ends the same: after all, even those he likes, Mary Jane or Uncle Silas, live according to the laws of this cruel world, where violence and death are inevitable. Remember how the “ideal” (in Huck’s eyes) Mary Jane, having learned about the deceit of the scammers from Huck, immediately wants to roll them in tar and feathers and throw them into the river - this is exactly what other people subsequently do to them. She, however, immediately pulls herself together and becomes kind girl, but this first impulse of hers cannot be forgotten. And Uncle Silas, calmly announcing the impending reprisal against the swindlers, just as calmly gathers farmers who are waiting with guns for the start of the hunt for the fugitive black man.
And it's not that historically this is the plantation South. The fact is that any form of organized civilized life is associated with the action of a cruel law - the law of the strong. And this right inevitably leads to the exclusion from life of those who turn out to be weaker. This is precisely what does not suit Huck, but suits Tom, although he agrees that the pangs of conscience are too annoying for a person.
Finding himself in many homes and families, the orphan and homeless Huck each time hopes to find the desired comfort, peace of mind. The desire for peace of mind is also an existential quality of a person. But Huck fails every time. He is an accomplished free person, and he cannot tolerate any enslavement, even if it is done with the good intentions of “education.” Unlike the patriarchal cozy world of “Tom Sawyer,” a kind of idyll where peace of mind is identified with the forms of life of provincial old America, the world of “Huck Finn” is homeless, blown through by the winds of the Mississippi, the river of life. In such winds, provincial comfort seems both boring and insignificant. The insignificance of life is revealed behind its outwardly comfortable forms.
What should Huck do, left alone? Of course, run away to Indian Territory. But we understand that this is a utopia, there is no longer any Indian territory left. The fate of an existential person, as Huck appears in the novel, is always tragic. And it’s not for nothing that at the beginning of the journey, Jim tells Huck fortunes about the future, and this fortune-telling, like any fortune-telling, is a little stupid and a little funny, because Jim is an uneducated man. “Stay as far away from the water as possible,” he prophesies, “so that something does not happen, because it is written in your birth that you will end your life on the gallows.”
But it is the water - the river - that becomes the real space of the soul for Huck. After all, if he was ever calm and happy, it was only on the river. Poetic descriptions of life on the river belong to the best pages of not only American, but also world prose.
It is on the river that the main plot event of the novel takes place: having gotten lost in the fog, the characters slip past the long-awaited place to which they were sailing - where the Missouri flows into the Mississippi, and from where they need to get to the free states. This fog has not only plot, but also mythological significance: after all, the entrance to the underground kingdom was covered with swirling fogs... This is the border between life and death that the heroes conventionally overcome. But in fact, Huck is fooling Tom, who believes that he dreamed of the fog and the adventure in the fog. Subsequently, in the story “The Mysterious Stranger,” Twain will return to the motif of life as a dream, a stupid and absurd dream.
And yet, what will happen to Huck next? This is the main thing. Because nothing will happen next. Why? Well, firstly, because the existence of an existential personality who has chosen a path different from everyone else is initially tragic, doom is her destiny. And secondly, the book is completed, and the hero’s life is limited to its framework, whether we like it or not. On the monument to the heroes of Mark Twain, which stands in America, they remain teenagers forever...
But the heroes of Mark Twain’s last story “The Mysterious Stranger” are trying to look behind the veil of the future and try to change it, to avoid the inevitable. They do this with the help of a fallen angel who appeared on earth. It seems that the hero-narrator, a boy from an Austrian village at the end of the 16th century, is the same Huck Finn. It is not for nothing that in one of the original versions of the story the action takes place in Twain’s native village of Hannibal, where Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and Satan act. Subsequently the action moved to medieval Europe, the characters have changed, but remains... Satan. Twain wrote in one of his letters that he dreams of writing “a book in which I will not limit myself in any way, I will not take into account the feelings and prejudices of others... a book in which I will express everything that I think, everything that is in my heart , everything frankly, without looking back.” This story was published posthumously in 1916 by Twain's secretary and custodian of literary heritage, Albert Payne. There is still no consensus on the text of the story. It is clearly not finished; the last chapter was taken by the publisher from an earlier version. However, even in this form, it indicates that Twain was moving in the direction of the artistic searches of his time, which can be defined as pre-modernism.
In the story, Satan convinces the boys that by changing the future towards death, he is doing good, because what is about to happen is best option from the many he calculated. Satan changes the original purpose and chooses the option in which one of the boys is destined to drown while saving the girl. All possible retreats would only be worse: if he had been rescued, he would have caught a cold and been paralyzed. He was destined to lie motionless for forty-six years with one dream - to die as soon as possible. Even worse would be the fate of the drowned girl, her mother’s only joy. She was destined to be terribly ill for ten years, and then to live a shameful, dirty and criminal life for nineteen years and die at the hands of the executioner. Satan delivers her from this, giving her the opportunity to drown as a child.
However, the last chapter of the story looks most unexpected and paradoxical: Satan reveals to the narrator that there is not only no heaven, no hell, there is not even earthly existence. Everything is just the hero’s thought and imagination, a dream, and he himself is not there either. A terrible world of emptiness, in which there is nothing but thought. And how could it be otherwise, if the world is structured so absurdly, as it can only be in a dream: “There is no God, no universe, no human race, no life, no heaven, no hell. This is all just a dream, an intricate, stupid dream. There is nothing but you. And you are just a thought, a wandering thought, an aimless thought, a homeless thought, lost in eternal space.”
However, Satan owns wonderful words in the story - a hymn to laughter, the basis of the work of Mark Twain himself: “For all their poverty, people possess one, undoubtedly, powerful weapon. This is laughter. Strength, money, arguments, pleas, perseverance - all this can be useful in the fight against the giant lie that rules over you. Over the course of centuries, you may be able to loosen it a little, weaken it a little. However, you can undermine it to the very roots, smash it to dust only with the help of laughter. Nothing can resist laughter."
This is probably a worthy way out of the disappointing results of the existential search of a man floating on a small raft along the River of Life.
L-ra: All-world literature and culture in the beginning. – 2001. – No. 11. – P. 27-30.
“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” analysis of Mark Twain’s work will help you prepare for the lesson.
"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" analysis
Year of writing — 1884
Genre- novel
the main idea- honest friendship and devotion, loyalty and decency.
In this work, Mark Twain tries to embody the main idea of his work - that the sources of spiritual nobility never dry up, and a person has enough strength to cope with the most difficult situations.
Main characters: Huckleberry Finn, Huck's Father, Miss Watson, Tom Sawyer, Judge Thatcher, Widow Douglas, Jim, King and Duke
Problems with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:
- the problem of freedom;
- friendship problem;
- the problem of human happiness;
- problem of education;
- problem of society;
- the problem of slavery...
Mark Twain was an opponent of racism and slavery, and through the mouth of his characters he directly and unequivocally states this from the pages of the novel.
Freedom, friendship, happiness are universal human values. Freedom has always been considered an indisputable value. Since ancient times, a person who sought to gain freedom was executed and subjected to sophisticated torture. But no trials could extinguish the love of freedom.
Freedom is the opportunity to express one’s will, the ability to act in accordance with one’s goals and interests; no restrictions.
At the time in which the novel was created, in the southern United States, slavery was the order of the day, it was legal, and helping a slave escape meant going against the law. Slavery was sanctified by the church, and Huck must make the most important choice in his life: should he follow the letter of the law or follow the movements of his heart? If you listen to your heart, then you need to free Jim, that is, go against the law and the church. But for Huck it is better to burn in hell than to betray his comrade.
Plot of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn":
This story tells how Huckleberry Finn was sheltered by the Widow Douglas. She decided to instill in him good manners and raised him in every possible way. Huck cannot stand this attitude and decides to run away from her to his drunken father. Huck also runs away from his father, but in order to divert the investigation down the wrong path, he staged a robbery of the shack and his own murder. He met a runaway black man, Jim, who also decided to go on the run after hearing that his mistress was going to sell him to slave traders. Next, by boat, they move to a floating house, a cave in which they are accommodated. Fleeing from his pursuers, Huck changes into a girl's outfit. Then they float on a raft down the Mississippi. At night they sailed on a raft, on which Jim built a hut and a second high floor, and during the day they slept, camouflaging the raft with green branches. Then they meet with the adventurers, the King and the Duke, who constantly came up with new adventures and scams, sometimes to earn food, and sometimes to rob people and get away. Huck likes the dexterity with which the King and Duke deceived the simple-minded inhabitants of small settlements, encountered on their way. But one day their fellow travelers decided to deceive the orphans. Huck intervened, he believed that deceiving orphans was unfair. After the scam goes wrong thanks to Huck's actions, the scammers hand Jim over to the authorities. They did this to take revenge on Huck and to earn money that was due for the capture of runaway blacks. To save Jim from slavery, Huck goes in search of Tom Sawyer so that his friend can help get Jim out of trouble. Tom not only helps organize Jim's escape, but also turns it into a spectacular performance. It turns out, however, that the escape was organized in vain. Jim's mistress died, and before her death she managed to free her slave.
“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is a novel by M. Twain. Published in 1885. From this work, as E. Hemingway noted, “all modern American literature emerged.”
As a continuation of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), the novel was conceived immediately after the completion of the first of the novels, but the implementation of the plan lasted almost a decade, as a result of which two famous books about boys from the banks of the Mississippi are both similar and dissimilar to each other.
For all the realism of the details, “Tom Sawyer” is an idyll, colored with humor and slightly seasoned with nostalgic sentimentality. This stopped moment, conquered by art from time, is the golden time of childhood with its serene freedom, excess of strength and imagination, infinity of play, thanks to which the monotony of provincial life is transformed into adventure, poverty into wealth, prose into poetry. The book about Tom, as Twain later admitted (in a letter of 1887), is “simply a hymn, which is clothed in prosaic form in order to give it an earthly appearance.” The anthem celebrates the non-pompous, the “decent” social norm(the relationship with which Twain himself was very problematic), and the charm of life is in its elemental, invincible, inimitable non-normativity.
In the new novel “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Twain makes one of his young heroes a narrator: the effect of transcription (unfortunately, almost disappearing in the Russian translation) creates the illusion of naive, free oral storytelling, the blessed spontaneity of the relationship between the narrator (Huck) and the listener (reader) in “oblivion” of etiquette, literary and grammatical norms. The composition of the novel, as almost always with Twain, is amorphous; the episodes are strung together on the thread of a journey, which would be more accurately called an escape from civilization. Its goal is conditional, even illusory: Huck and Nave Jim are not so much moving as they are driven by the powerful and capricious current of the Mississippi. Having slipped through Cairo in the fog, from where Jim intended to flee to the North, to freedom (the artificiality of this move was noted by everyone who wrote about the novel: in order to get to the free state of Illinois, travelers only had to cross the river from Jackson Island), the raft glides along the river, further and further south, and therefore the risk of exposure and new captivity only increases. The raft is the only shelter, the refuge of Huck and Jim, an orphan boy and a runaway slave, who are both homeless, defenseless and can rely solely on loyalty to each other. Any contact with other people, any foray ashore is fraught for them with violence, betrayal or deception. The pictures of life along the banks of the great American river are colorful, but unattractive, everywhere the same: dirt, stupidity, stultifying village boredom, habitual cruelty and fear, cynical fraud. Forced to interact with the dangerous world of adults, Huck protects himself from it by playing. He changes masks again and again, not inferior in this to professional actors (for example, the King and Duke), and sometimes surpassing them, “outplaying” them. In comparison with his desperate improvisations, Tom Sawyer's mostly book games look artificial, even contrived. But, for all his devotion to the game, Huck is also endowed with a “non-childish” sensitivity to the pain of others; his sympathy extends even to those who seem least capable of causing it. “People can be very cruel to each other,” is his comment, restrained and succinct, to the scene of the reprisal of the King and Duke - scoundrels who certainly deserved punishment.
Perhaps the most famous scene in all of American literature is the moment towards the end of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, when Huck makes a choice between conscience as a social prescription internalized by a voice. public opinion(he orders to inform on Jim, to return the fugitive “property” to the rightful owners) and conscience as a direct moral instinct. The desperate determination to “burn in hell”, having deliberately sinned against the first, demonstrates the enviable health of the second.
The rich, complex sound of the novel, which combined elements of idyll and picaresque, everyday life and “wild” humor, romantic myth and evil social satire, provided it with a privileged place in Twain’s work, in the tradition of American realism and in the national literary canon, no matter how overestimated it may be exposed.
History of the creation of the work
Mark Twain began writing a novel about one of the characters in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a tramp named Huck Finn, in 1876. However, the writer put the novel aside after writing about one-fourth of the book. He returned to writing in 1883, finished it in 1884, and published it in 1885 in Great Britain.
The first edition of the novel “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” was accompanied by the author’s remark “The time of action is 40 or 50 years ago” - this is an autobiographical reference, indicating that the author, as a teenager, was a direct participant in the events (as in the book about Tom Sawyer).
It is known that in his childhood he witnessed an incident of friendship between a young fisherman and a runaway black man (the central event of the story). The fisherman, knowing about the high reward for the capture of the black man, was not tempted by the money and did not betray his friend.
Many of the events described in the novel were the author’s childhood impressions, which is why the novel turned out to be surprisingly realistic, truthful and merciless, and made it a work from which “all modern American literature came” (Ernest Hemingway’s opinion).
Composition, content
The novel about Huck Finn is classified as a “Great American Novels.” His main stylistic feature is that it is written in a colloquial version of the language (this is the first time this has been recorded in American literature, and for this work it received a barrage of criticism).
The narration is told in the first person - from the perspective of Huckleberry Finn. The author vividly depicts the language and speech of a little tramp, creating a magical illusion of a boy’s narrative, without any etiquette, literary or grammatical rules.
The novels “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” turned out to be extremely different: “Tom Sawyer” is nostalgic and idyllic, “Huck Finn” is naturalistic and cruel. In terms of composition, there are also significant differences: “Tom Sawyer” is smooth and consistent, “Huck Finn” has a fragmentary and amorphous composition. Central line narrative - the raft journey and subsequent escape of Huck and Jim. All episodes are compositional links of this central chain.
At the end of the first book, Huck and Tom become rich after discovering Injun Joe's treasure. The Widow Douglas took Huck into her home as her savior, intending to adopt him and raise him to be a gentleman. Huck's father, a drunkard and a scoundrel, appears in the city and, kidnapping him, keeps him in a forest hut. Huck fakes his own murder and escapes from his father down the river to Jackson's Island. Huck is not alone on the island - Jim, a runaway black man, is taking refuge here. He flees north to earn money and ransom his family.
During the Mississippi flood, a raft floats past Jackson Island, and Huck and Jim decide to sail away on it (Jim is now being sought on suspicion of Huck's murder). They sail at night, buy or steal food, steal a boat with loot from bandits, stumble upon a steamer in the dark, drown and are saved, and lose each other.
Huck sometimes feels remorse because he actually stole someone else's property - a black man, but at the same time he understands that he cannot betray the friend Jim has become for him. The scammers who approached the traveling couple betray Jim, and he is sent to prison, and Huck ends up with the Phelps family, relatives of Tom Sawyer. Huck and Tom prepare Jim's escape, but when freeing the black man, Tom is wounded by a bullet.
In the end, it turns out that Jim’s owner, Miss Watson, died, bequeathing the black man’s freedom, and Tom knew this very well, but could not give up the plan for the sake of adventure.
Hero of the novel
The central character of the novel is Huckleberry Finn. It is no coincidence that the author makes Huck, not Tom, the narrator. Main character the novel is a tramp, a true child of the people, with a colorful and expressive language. Due to its unique language and naturalistic paintings, in some states the book was equated to “garbage fit only for a landfill” and was removed from libraries.
The story and character of Huck are fully revealed in the work, whereas in the first part about Tom Sawyer, Huck was drawn lightly and cursorily. Huck is a man of nature and a child of the streets, he is a child, but he looks at the world realistically and independently. By helping Jim, Huck, first of all, satisfies his primary need - to always be free.
At first, Huck, as a citizen of the South, views Negro slavery as something self-evident and natural, but in the end he understands the value of loyalty, courage, devotion and begins to value friendship with a Negro. It’s paradoxical - because for such friendship in America at the end of the 19th century you had to be a very brave person.
Problems of the novel
True realists received the novel brilliantly, recognizing its vitality, innovation and realism of high quality.
This is a story about the friendship of disparate layers of society (the author gave Jim and Huck equal rights, making Huck a powerless tramp, the scum of a decent society), about the prejudices of slave owners, about true freedom and the need for it of people not shackled by the chains of slavery.
Mark Twain defends the right of blacks to a normal life: for centuries they have been taught that they were created for service, that the white is better and smarter than the black. The author claims that gentlemanship is not passed on by blood, and around black people there are a lot of white people with black souls.
Main work Mark Twain- novel "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"(1885). "This is our best book“,” wrote E. Hemingway, “all American literature came from it.” He meant the broadest aspect of the work’s impact: its democracy and humanity, its universality, as well as a new language for literature, simple and as close as possible to colloquial speech. All this became properties of American literature of the 20th century.
The novel "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is adjacent to "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer": it has the same characters and the same time frame. But this piece reveals a more mature position of the author, richer in all aspects. human experience and has a deeper general meaning. The purely artistic evolution of the writer is just as obvious. Twain's style, already fully formed in "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" as one of the best in American literature, light, sharp and sensitive to dialect nuances, has now transformed into a new quality.
The writer returned here to his favorite and repeatedly tested form of narration in the first person and made the hero-storyteller not Tom, a boy from a bourgeois family, but Huck, a homeless tramp, a child of the people. This had a double effect. Firstly, the skillfully reproduced, strong and colorful, truly popular language in which the book is written gives the picture of American life a special plastic expressiveness, creating the impression of a conversation “without an intermediary” - as if America itself was talking about itself in its own voice. Secondly, this made it possible to more fully and deeply reveal the character of the hero, only briefly outlined in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and to show the formation of his personality.
Huck's mind is free from romantic clichés, and his character is shaped by reality. He has no external ostentatious virtues, but he has all the essential virtues. Nature gave him a strong, faithful heart, open to all the humiliated and rejecting arrogant force, no matter what it was expressed in. Huck has a sense of inner independence that makes him flee from the contentment and comfort that the Widow Douglas offers him into the wide, menacing world. His love of freedom is a rejection of hypocrisy, petty-bourgeois prosperity and legalized lies.
Compared to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a new, very significant property appears in the character of Huck - civil courage. From the very first chapters, Twain makes Huck an active participant in the social conflict. He is the protector and harborer of the runaway slave. Moreover, by saving Jim from slave traders, he risks losing his own freedom. But Twain emphasizes that the need to fight for Jim’s freedom is as organically inherent in Huck as hatred of everything that constrains him. Although not entirely conscious, Huck's struggle for social justice gives his rebellion a much deeper social meaning than in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Huck's character is given development, and this development is convincingly motivated. Huck grew up in the South, where slavery left its mark on the thinking of every white person. For a long time and with great difficulty, he wades through the thicket of slaveholding prejudices in his own mind, until the man finally defeats the southerner in him, until he finally decides to remain faithful to Jim. Twain does not for a minute separate the hero from the environment that raised him, and at the same time shows him in a state of constant struggle with the prejudices of this environment. The dialectical contradiction underlying the image makes it especially lively and dynamic, giving it psychological authenticity.
It is symptomatic that in the novel Huck, a pariah of society, still stands in the eyes of those around him at a higher level of the social ladder than the black man. But just as Huck surpasses Tom in courage and spiritual qualities, Negro Jim surpasses Huck in loyalty and natural courage. To portray black as the most noble man in the novel, to paint a picture of friendship between a white man and a black man, a friendship that gave a lot to both, required great courage and courage in 1880s America.
No less courage and courage were required from Twain the artist to so defiantly violate the generally accepted norms of literary language for the sake of life’s truth. How innovative this work was is evidenced by the heated controversy that unfolded around the novel upon its publication. The zealots of fine literature, who demanded an impeccably smooth style, an impeccably virtuous hero and certainly “good manners,” branded the book as “obscene, vulgar and rude.” In Concord, Massachusetts, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was removed from city libraries as "garbage fit only for the landfill."
Realist writers perceived the novel as an innovative and highly artistic work. Joel C. Harris defined the essence of M. Twain's book briefly and meaningfully: “This is life.”
In "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" the main drawback of Twain's technique was overcome, or rather, "bypassed" - the compositional ill-conceivedness that remained with Twain from his days as a reporter. Almost all of the writer’s books are distinguished by a free composition, close to associative thinking, which his friend W.D. advised him to fight against. Howells. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, this disadvantage turned into a bright advantage. It turned out to be extremely organic to the author's plan: the free composition of the novel surprisingly corresponds to the very important image of the great river, against which colorful pictures of life unfold, colored with humor, fiction, melodrama, and genuine tragedy.
The image of the full-flowing Mississippi River not only unites the action, but also, by contrast, highlights the pettiness and meaninglessness of human passions and ambitions: pictures replace one another, and the river continues to slowly roll its waters across the vast expanses of America. The river determines the state of Huck's soul - it takes away his worries, gives him peace and wisdom. The image of the great river embodies the freedom that the heroes of the novel strive for—Huck, fleeing from his monster father, and the runaway black man, Jim—and gives their aspiration an eternal, timeless meaning.
The inner spring of the novel that drives the plot is the escape of Jim and Huck from the slave states and their journey on a raft along the river in search of freedom. This allows Twain to expand the framework of the narrative, to develop a broad picture of American reality. The narrative reveals much darker sides of life than the random dramas in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: the indifference and sadism of poor whites, the cowardice of the mob about to stage a lynching, the fraud of merchants, the senseless hostility of rich landowners.
Behind all this lurked fear; not just the superstitious fear of an impressionable teenager or a dark man, the Negro Jim. This is a very real and justified fear of an endless tangled chain of robberies, beatings, drownings, murders. Around every turn of the road, around every bend in the river, there is the danger of violent death. The main characters are thrown into this cruel world: a homeless orphan boy and a runaway black man, Jim, who, relying solely on each other’s loyalty, try not to fall under the monstrous pressure of white and adult supremacy.
The friendship between white and colored Americans, who, due to their love of freedom, equally found themselves outcasts from “decent society”, is a Cooper discovery, innovatively developed by Twain. The different ages of the heroes, the initial “compulsion” of the union, the complete (even imaginary) dependence of one on the other (the elder on the younger) make Huck and Jim an independent paired archetype of US literature (“The Harp of the Woods” by T. Capote, “To Kill a Mockingbird” by H. Lee and etc.).
The story told by Twain about slavery and freedom, about death and rebirth (in order to elude his father, Huck cunningly faked his death) has not only a concrete, but also a symbolic meaning. The novel is not only about the legalized slavery of black Americans, but also about the unfreedom of a white man, enslaved by social conventions and environmental prejudices, not only about the “rebirth” of the hero after his imaginary death, but also about the actual birth of his personality, which has acquired spiritual breadth. Huck and Jim's desire for freedom is also man's eternal desire for spiritual liberation. Freedom is associated with the river (read: state of mind), not with the North or South.
The generation of Twain, James, Howells created a new literary language, built a bridge to Europe, theoretically determined the further development of American literature and, thus, prepared the appearance of their younger contemporaries of naturalist writers: Norris, Garland, Crane, London, Dreiser. The countdown in US literature of the 20th century began with the last of them.
The world of the works of these writers, in essence, the one from which they all came, was not the world of traditional culture or traditional moral standards, which was initially blamed on the literary youth of the 1890-1900s. It was a world of farmers and immigrant workers, small traders and disillusioned priests, impoverished artists and prostitutes.
