The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." -- Ernest Hemingway

Some notes about the novel:

• Satirical tone—Satire: A literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony and/or wit. Generally some sort of “Social Commentary.”
• Among the first in major American literature to be written in the vernacular: The language or dialect spoken by the ordinary people in a particular country or region.
• Dialect: A variation of a language spoken within a particular region or class. Vocabulary, pronunciation, or grammatical form is different from standard form of the language.
• Example: “Yo’ ole father doan’ know yet what he’s a-gywne to do. Sometime he spec he’ll go way, en den ag’in he spec he’ll stay. De bes’ way is to res’ easy en let de ole man take his own way” (Twain 18)

Context of the novel (and our focus):

• In the early 1880s, the hopefulness of the post–Civil War years began to fade. The harsh measures the North imposed only made the South more bitter.
• As a result, many Southern politicians began an effort to control and oppress the black men and women whom the war had freed.
• As Twain worked on his novel, race relations, which seemed to be on a positive path in the years following the Civil War, once again became strained. The imposition of Jim Crow laws, designed to limit the power of blacks in the South in a variety of indirect ways, brought the beginning of a new, insidious effort to oppress. The new racism of the South, less institutionalized and monolithic, was also more difficult to combat. Slavery could be outlawed, but when white Southerners enacted racist laws or policies under a professed motive of self-defense against newly freed blacks, far fewer people, Northern or Southern, saw the act as immoral and rushed to combat it.

For our purposes, we'll only read four chapters: chapters 5 & 6, and chapters 15 & 16. Here is a summary of chapters 1-4 and chapters 7-14.