Who is the Author of Huckleberry Finn?
Mark Twain
What was Mark Twains real name?
Samuel Langhorne Clemens
When was Mark Twain born? Why is it significant?
November 30,1835, the night Halley's Comet flashed across the sky
What is Halley's Comet
Halley's comet is the only comet visible to the naked eye
Appears about every 75 years
Where did Mark Twain grow up?
Along the Mississippi
At what age did Mark Twain quit school?
12
When did Mark Twain die? Why is it significant?
April 21, 1910, as Halley's comet again flashed through the sky
What are Twains works?
(Travel books-non fiction)
-Innocents Abroad
-Life on the Mississippi
(Historic novels)
-The Prince and the Pauper
-A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
(Short stories)
-The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras Country
What was the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn written after?
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
What happened at the end of Tom Sawyer?
Huckleberry Finn, a poor boy with a drunken father, and his friend Tom Sawyer, a middle-class boy with an imagination too active for his own good, found a robber's stash of gold.
What happened as a result of Huck's adventure
Huck gained quite a bit of money, which the bank held for him in trust. Huck was taken in by the Widow Douglas, a kind but stifling woman who lives with her sister, the self-righteous Miss Watson.
Mark Twain described the major theme of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as....
A sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision, and conscience suffers defeat.
A sound heart
a good, honest heart.
A deformed conscience
a conscience influenced by the laws of society and a sense of duty toward those laws.
What is the Genre of the novel, (huckleberry finn)
Satiric Novel (Fiction)
A work that uses humor, irony, and
extreme exaggeration to ridicule society in
order to bring about change
Who is the Narrator & Protagonist
Huck Finn: literal, realistic, practical
What is the setting?
Time:
Before the Civil War; roughly 1835-1845
Place:
The Mississippi River town of St. Petersburg, Missouri
The adventure continues down the Mississippi into Arkansas
Themes: What does Twain teach us about each idea?
Racism & Slavery
Intellectual and Moral Education
The Hypocrisy of "Civilized" Society
Although written 20 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, America - especially the South - was..
still struggling with racism and the aftereffects of slavery.
Insidious racism arose near the end of Reconstruction that..
oppressed blacks for illogical and hypocritical reasons.
Twain exposes the hypocrisy of slavery and demonstrates how racism..
distorts the oppressors as much as the oppressed.
The result is a..
world of moral confusion.
How is Hucks education?
poor because he is uneducated
What does Huck distrusts?
the morals and precepts of the society that treats him as an outcast and fails to protect him from abuse.
What does Huck question?
his teachings, especially regarding race and slavery.
In many instances, Huck chooses to "go to hell" rather than..
go along with the rules of society.
Civilized" to Huck means...
-Regular baths, uncomfortable clothes
-Mandatory school attendance
-Degraded rules that defy logic
-Huck's drunkard, abusive father gets to keep custody of Huck because he is his natural father
-The injustice of slavery that keeps Jim from his family
-See
What are Motifs?
recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text's major themes.
Childhood
theme
Huck's youth is an important factor in his moral education; only a child is open-minded enough to undergo the kind of development that Huck does.
Lies and Cons
theme
Huckleberry Finn is full of malicious lies and scams; the lies are bad and hurt a number of innocent people.
Superstitions and Folk Beliefs
theme
Jim believes in a wide range of superstitions and folktales; although Huck is reluctant to believe at first, many of the beliefs indeed have some basis in reality.
Parodies of Popular Romance Novels
theme
The story is full of people who base their lives on romantic literary models and stereotypes of various kinds
Tom Sawyer, for example, bases his life and actions on adventure novels
Major Conflict in Huckleberry Finn?
Huck's internal struggle with his "deformed conscience.
What does Climax mean
The point in the story where the protagonist's conflict is resolved, leading to the resolution of the story.
The climax of Huckleberry Finn?
is when Huck decides to steal Jim out of slavery from the Phelps farm (his own moral code) despite the fact that he believes he will suffer in hell for it (society's teachings)
quotes
-Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren's en makes 'em ashamed.
-It don't make no difference how foolish it is, it's the right way - and it's the regular way.
-All right then, I'll go to hell.
-You feel mig
Major Symbol:
The Mississippi River
In Huck Finn, the river symbolizes...
freedom, and it becomes symbolic of Huck's journey to discover his natural virtue. The current determines the direction of the raft as well as Huck's life.
There is a major contrast between..
why
ife on the river and life on the shore because life on the river (uncivilized) is peaceful and easy, yet not totally without danger; however, life on the shore (civilized) can be cruel, authoritarian, hypocritical, and reflective of what Twain called the
Life on the raft is..
paradoxical. Even though they are confined to a small space on the raft, Huck and Jim experience greater freedom on the raft.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been a controversial book since it was first published in...
why?
1885 - mostly because of its inappropriate language and racial slurs.
Twain's View on Slavery
As a schoolboy, Twain had no aversion to slavery
He was not aware there was anything wrong with it
The papers said nothing against it
Churches taught that God approved it
He took a strong liking to blacks when they worked on his family's farm
He and his f
Where does Huckleberry Finn live?
Missouri before the Civil War, near the Mississippi River
Huck is....and.....
young
uneducated
What is Hucks father like?
alcoholic and unreliable
T or F, huck has grown up mostly on his own
TRUE
Not long before the novel begins, however, huck has been taken to live with the....
Widow Douglas and her sister
What does Huck think
life with the two sisters is too civilized
What does Huck prefer?
living in the open and having adventures with his friend tom saywer
what do huck and tom like to do
plan great adventures and play pranks on people
on one of their adventures, what did the two boys find in a cave?
alot of money
(described in the novel the adventures of tom saywer)
What happens when Hucks father, Pap, returns home?
Pap wants Huck's money- and kidnaps him to get it
What happens after a miserable time with his father?
huck escapes
While he is running away who does he meet?
Jim
Who is Jim?
a slave of Widow Douglas's sister-who has escaped too
Where do the two set off together too?
on a raft on the Mississippi River-on one of the most famous journeys in American Literature.
Mark Twain vividly depicts what in his stories
the lives and dialects of southern ppl from long ago
Twain also sues.... and.... both to entertain and to comment on society
humor and satire
Where does the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn take place
in the years before the civil war
In the south,...
a slave was considered property
stealing a hunted slave was seen as a great...
crime and morally wrong
When did twain right the novel
1880s when the civil war had been fought and the slaves had been freed
What happened when HBF was published?
critics hated the novel, accusing it of "coarse fun" and "gutter realism.
who is Louisa May Alcott
author of Little Woman
what did Louisa May Alcott say about Twain
wrote "If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses, he had best stop writing for them.
the book sold....
50,000 copies in the first month
Twain thoughts on Jim
Also, in a way perhaps surprising for the time, he allows Jim to speak for himself, revealing truths that even Twain may have found uncomfortable.