Referat THE ADVENTURE OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN

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The adventure of Huckleberry FinnSamuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, on Nov. 30, 1835, the sixth child of John and Jane Clemens. Several years later, in 1839, the family moved to nearby Hannibal, where Clemens spent his boyhood years. During his youth, Clemens had a strong tie to the Mississippi River, along which his town was located. Steamboats landed at the prosperous town three times a day, and Clemens' boyhood dream was to become a steamboatman on the river. Clemens' newspaper career began while still a boy in Hannibal. In 1848, a year after his father's death, he was apprentice to printer Joseph Ament, who published the Missouri Courier. By the age of 16, in 1851, Sam was working for his brother Orion's Hannibal Western Union, for which he wrote his first published sketches and worked as a printer. Over the next two years, he continued at the Western Union, occasionally taking stints as editor in Orion's absence. In 1852, Sam published several sketches in Philadelphia's Saturday Evening Post. Clemens left Hannibal in 1853, at age 18, and worked as a printer in New York City and Philadelphia over the next year. During his trip east, he published travel letters in the Hannibal Journal. Upon returning to the Midwest in 1854, Clemens lived in several cities on the Mississippi; the most prominent of these was Keokuk, Iowa, where his brother Orion founded the Keokuk Journal. By 1857, a 21-year-old Clemens was in New Orleans, seeking a berth on a ship going to South America, when he met steamboat pilot Horace Bixby. He persuaded Bixby to accept him as an apprentice and teach him the Mississippi for a fee of $500. After living on the river for two years as a cub pilot, Sam received his pilot's license in 1859, at the age of 23. With the start of the Civil War, in April 1861, river traffic on the Mississippi was suspended, and Clemens' steamboat pilot career came to an end. He joined a volunteer militia group called the Marion Rangers, which drilled for two weeks before disbanding. By the summer of 1861, Sam accompanied Orion to the Nevada Territory by stagecoach; Orion had been appointed by President Lincoln as secretary of the new Territory, and Sam was to be his secretary. In 1861, the Nevada Territory was being inundated with gold and silver prospectors, inspired by the 1858 discovery of the Comstock Lode, one of the largest metal deposits in the world. Almost immediately upon reaching Nevada, Clemens became involved with mining, travelling to some of the most promising prospecting regions, including Humboldt, Esmeralda, and Aurora. Clemens never did strike it rich, and was forced to work in a quartz mill to support himself. Clemens had been sporadically contributing humorous letters to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, the territory's most well-known newspaper, and, by September 1862, was accepted a job to be a reporter for the paper, at $25 a week. Clemens covered the territorial legislature, local news items, and contributed humorous pieces. During his stint at the Enterprise, the 27-year-old Clemens was greatly influenced by Joseph Goodman, the paper's founder, and Dan De Quille, a star writer; both men would be friends of Clemens for years to come. After 17 months, Clemens left the Enterprise for San Francisco, apparently to avoid antiduelling laws after challenging a rival editor to fight. Arriving in San Francisco in 1864, Clemens went to work for the Call, a local paper, as a full-time reporter, and then was the Pacific correspondent for the Territorial Enterprise. Clemens was based in San Francisco for the next four years, writing for Golden Era, the Californian, and other publications. He was a central figure in the literary scene of the city, which included Bret Harte, C.H. Webb, and others. In 1866, he took a four-month trip to Hawaii as a correspondent for the Sacramento Union. Upon returning to San Francisco, a 30-year-old Clemens capitalized on the success of his "Sandwich Islands" letters by organizing a lecture on the topic. The success of this venture prompted him to arrange his first lecture tour, a two-month swing through northern California and western Nevada. For the remainder of his life, Clemens was to be one of the most loved and coveted speakers in the United States. Clemens left California at the end of 1866, and headed to New York City. Shortly after arriving there, he arranged to be a correspondent for the San Francisco Alta California aboard the Quaker City, which was departing for a voyage to Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. Before departing on the trip, Clemens arranged to publish his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog Of Calaveras County, And Other Sketches, a collection of published stories from his Western days. He also performed his Sandwich Island lecture at the Cooper Union, New York's largest hall, and took a lecture tour through the Missouri and Iowa, including a return stop in Hannibal. Through his lecture tours and his popular letters from the Quaker City, the 31-year-old Clemens was becoming quite a well-known celebrity. Upon returning to New York, Clemens accepted a position as secretary to Senator William M. Stewart, in Washington, D.C. He was asked by Elisha Bliss, of the American Publishing Co., to write a book about his Quaker City experiences, which would become The Innocents Abroad, released in July 1869. Also, shortly after returning to New York, Clemens met Olivia (Livy) Langdon, the older sister of Jervis, a friend from the Quaker City trip. The following year, 1868, was a busy one for Sam. He travelled back to California and Nevada on a lecture tour, finished Innocents in San Francisco, published several sketches in various publications, and began courting Livy. By the end of the year, Sam, now 33, became secretly engaged with Livy to be married. Over the next two years, Clemens travelled extensively on lecture tours around the East and Midwest, published his book, bought an interest in the Buffalo Express, and wrote numerous sketches. With his marriage in 1870 to the 25-year-old Livy, Clemens' life took a dramatic turn toward stabilization and normalcy. The couple settled down in Buffalo, N.Y., in a house bought by Livy's father, and Sam worked on the Express as editor. He also wrote a monthly column for the Galaxy, a New York literary magazine. Besides all of this activity, Clemens contracted to write Roughing It, an account of his experiences in Nevada and California. During this period in 1870, however, tragedy struck the young couple. First Livy's father died; then her close friend died while staying with the Clemenses; finally, their first child, Langdon, was born premature, and lived only two years in a sickly state. The situation stabilized the following year, when Sam rented a house in Hartford, Conn.'s, upper class Nook Farm. He published Roughing It, continued on lecture tours throughout the country, bought a parcel of land in Nook Farm on which to build a house, and visited England for the first time. In March 1872, Susy Clemens is born. On a return trip to England with his family in 1873, the 38-year-old Clemens, by this time a substantial literary celebrity, met such notables as Ivan Turgenev, Robert Browning, Anthony Trollope, and Lewis Carroll. He also published The Gilded Age, with Charles Dudley Warner, his first fictional book. By June 1874, Sam and Olivia's second daughter, Clara, was born. Their third and final child, Jean, was born in 1880. Now settled into his own home in Hartford, Clemens devoted himself to writing novels and sketches, and performing the occasional lecture. It was the period of Clemens' greatest literary output. At this time, Sam began tapping into his youthful experiences in Hannibal as material for some of the most famous novels in his catalogue The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, published in 1876; Life On The Mississippi, 1883; and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1885. The family spent a year and a half in Europe, in 1878/79, in order for Sam to collect material for a travel book, which resulted in 1880's A Tramp Abroad. A year later, The Prince And The Pauper was released. This was Clemens' first attempt at writing historical fiction with a serious theme, a marked departure from the humorous books of his earlier career. Another classic historical novel, although more satirical, was A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court, released in 1889. Although now a settled family man, Clemens managed to partake in several lecture tours around North America in 1884/85. Dissatisfied with most of his publishers, Clemens founded his own publishing company in 1884, called Charles L. Webster & Company. The firm was in existence for 10 years, and was an early success after the publication of Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs in 1886, and reissues of Twain's earlier books. From 1887 on, however, the company faced difficulties and suffered setbacks, finally closing its doors in 1894 due to bankruptcy. During the 1880s and early 90s, Clemens became heavily involved with investing in the Paige compositor, an automatic typesetting machine. He poured great amounts of money in the machine, and even founded a company in 1886 to manufacture and distribute it. The advent of the linotype machine, however, sent the Paige compositor to its doom. After the second model of the machine failed a test run at the Chicago Herald in 1894, where 32 linotypes were running smoothly, the machine was scrapped. Clemens contributed to the bankruptcy of his publishing company when he shifted funds from that firm into the compositor. By the early 1890s, Clemens' financial situation was in poor shape as a result of these failures, and the cost of living an extravagant social lifestyle at the house in Hartford. In order to stave off personal bankruptcy, Sam closed down the Hartford house in 1891, and took the family to live in Europe. Throughout most of the decade, the Clemens family lived at various addresses in France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. Regardless of his financial situation, though, Clemens still managed to finish numerous novels and sketches; the most prominent of these were The American Claimant (1892), Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), Personal Recollections of Joan Of Arc (1895), and "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg" (1898). In 1895/96, Clemens and family undertook an around-the-world lecture tour, which also provided him with material for his final travel book, Following The Equator (1897). Tragedy struck during the tour, however, when eldest daughter Susy died in Hartford in 1896, a tragic blow to the family. By 1898, Clemens had managed to pay off all of his creditors, a feat that elevated him to heroic status in the eyes of the public. Providing invaluable financial assistance during this time of financial hardship was Standard Oil executive Henry Rogers. In 1900 and 1901, Clemens lived in New York City (14 West 10th St.) and in Riverdale, N.Y., just outside the city. He lectured extensively during this period, and took an active role in New York's social scene. Yale University presented him with an honorary degree in 1901, and the University of Missouri did likewise in 1902. Shortly after buying a house in Tarrytown, N.Y., Livy became seriously ill and spent long periods of isolation in Maine, before being advised to seek the warmer climate of Florence, Italy, in late 1903. Sam and Livy were apart for most of the time leading up to her death in Florence in June 1904. Clemens spent the years following Livy's death primarily in New York City. After selling the Tarrytown house in 1904, he lived at 21 Fifth Ave. until 1908, primarily writing and making public appearances. In 1905, Clemens dined at the White House with Theodore Roosevelt, and a gala 70th birthday banquet was held at Delmonico's in New York. In 1907, Clemens received an honorary degree from Oxford University. Twain's more significant writings during the first decade of the 20th century included: "A Double-Barrelled Detective Story" (1902), "Was It Heaven? or Hell?" (1902), Extracts From Adam's Diary (1904), Eve's Diary (1906), What Is Man? (1906), Chapters From My Autobiography (1906/07), Extract From Captain Stormfield's Visit To Heaven (1908), and Letters From The Earth (1909).By 1908, Clemens moved into his final home, a residence in Redding, Conn., which he called Stormfield. During the final years of his life, Clemens organized the Angelfish Club, an informal organization of schoolage girls, called Angelfish, whom he kept in correspondence with and invited to stay with him. Declaring himself the admiral of the club, Clemens set the rules for admittance: sincerity, good disposition, schoolgirl age, and intelligence. The billiard room of Stormfield was the offical headquarters, and various other parts of the house were given fish-related names. Sam also set the rule that any Angelfish who went three months without writing to him would be suspended. Although this setup might appear inappropriate, Clemens' relationship with the girls appears to have been fully platonic. In December 1909, Clemens' youngest daughter, Jean, died at Stormfield. Immediately after this tragedy, Twain wrote "The Death Of Jean", the last substantial writing he completed. The piece recalled the sudden tragedy of the death, and his feelings regarding the loss of his other family members. Following its completion, Clemens vowed never to write again. Clemens' health rapidly deteriorated after Jean's death. In January 1910, he went to Bermuda for his health, but sensed that he wasn't to live long. On April 21, 1910, Clemens sank into a coma at Stormfield. At sunset, his heart failed and he died in his bed. He was 74 years old. On April 23, a large funeral procession was held in New York City, and a service was held at the Presbyterian Brick Church. Clemens was buried alongside his wife and children at Woodlawn Cemetary, in Elmira, N.Y. In November 1835, at the time of Clemens' birth, Halley's Comet made an appearance in the night sky. Strikingly, the comet's next appearance came during April 1910, the period of Clemens' death. Throughout his life, Clemens said that he would "go out with the comet," knowing the 75-year span between the comet's appearances. His prediction was amazingly accurate. Literary activityMark Twains first important work, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, was first published in the New York Saturday Press on November 18, 1865. The only reason it was published there was because his story arrived too late to be included in a book Artemus Ward was compiling featuring sketches of the wild American west.After this small burst of popularity, Twain was commissioned by the Sacramento Union to write letters about his travel experiences for publication in the newspaper, his first of which was to accompany the steamer Ajax in its maiden voyage to Hawaii, referred to at the time as the Sandwich Islands. These humorous letters proved the genesis to his work with the San Francisco Alta California newspaper, which designated him a traveling correspondent for a trip from San Francisco to New York City via the Panama isthmus. All the while Twain was writing letters meant for publishing back and forth, chronicling his experiences with his burlesque humor.In 1872, Twain published a second piece of travel literature, Roughing It, as a semi-sequel to Innocents. Roughing It is a semi-autobiographical account of Twain's journey to Nevada and his subsequent life in the American West. The book lampoons American and Western society in the same way that Innocents critiqued the various countries of Europe and the Middle East. Twain's next work would keep Roughing It's focus on American society, but focused more on the events of the day. Entitled, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, it was not a travel piece, as his previous two books had been, and was his first attempt at writing a novel. The book is also notable because it is Twain's only collaboration, it was written with his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner.For his next two works, Twain would again drew from his past experiences, focusing on his experiences on the Mississippi River. Old Times on the Mississippi, a series of sketches published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1875. Generally, Old Times features Twains dissolution with Romanticism, or, more literally, becoming too smart about things. Old Times would eventually come the starting point for his later book Life on the Mississippi. Twain's next major publication wasThe Adventures of Tom Sawyer. This work drew on Twain's youth in Hannibal so that he could aptly tap into the innocence that he lost while composing Old Times. The character of Tom Sawyer was a concoction of Twain as a child along with a number of other school mates, exaggerated and aggrandized into one of the endearing characters in American literature. The book also introduced the character of Huckleberry Finn, though he is only a supporting character.The Prince and the Pauper, despite a storyline that is omnipresent in film and literature today, was not as well received. Pauper was Twains first attempt at fiction and blame for its shortcomings are usually put on Twain having not been experienced enough in English society and the fact that it was produced after such a massive hit. In between the writing of Pauper, Twain had started Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (which he had consistently hit a wall in the writing process) and started and completed another travel book A Tramp Abroad. Tramp Abroad follows Twain as he travels through central and southern Europe.Twains next major published work, Huckleberry Finn, solidified him as a great American writer after the production of what some call the elusive great American novel. Finn was an offshoot from Tom Sawyer and proved to have a more serious tone than its predecessor. The main premise behind Huckleberry Finn is the young boys belief in the right thing to do even though the majority of society believes that it was wrong. Hucks blind eye toward the rules and mores of the age to follow what he thinks is just (the story takes place in the 1850s where slavery is present), make this book a standard read for children in the United States. Four hundred manuscript pages of Huckleberry Finn was written in the summer of 1876, right after the publication of Tom Sawyer. Some accounts have Twain taking seven years off after his first burst of creativity, eventually finishing the book in 1883. Other accounts have Twain working on Finn in tandem with The Prince and the Pauper and other works in 1880 and other years. Ernest Hemingway once said of Huckleberry Finn: If you read it, you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating.Near the end of Huckleberry Finn, Twain had written Life on the Mississippi, which is said to have heavily influenced the former book. The work recounts Twains memories and new experiences after a 22 year absence from the Mississippi. The book is of most note because Twain introduces the real meaning of his pseudonym.After his great work, Twain began turning to his business endeavors to keep them afloat and to stave off the increasing difficulties he had been having from his writing projects. Twain focused on the writing of President Ulysses S. Grant's Memoirs for his fledgling publishing company, finding time in between to write The Private History of a Campaign That Failed for The Century Magazine.Twain next focused on A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which featured him making his first big pronouncement of disappointment with politics. The tone become cynical to the point of almost being a rant against the established political system of the day (which would have been in King Arthurs time), and eventually devolved into madness for the main character. The book was started in December 1885, then shelved a few months later until the summer of 1887, and eventually finished in the spring of 1889.Some say that this work marked the beginning of the end for Twain as he fell into financial trouble and eschewed his humor vein. Twain had begun to furiously write articles and commentary with diminishing returns to pay the bills and keep his business intentions afloat, but it was not enough as he filed for bankruptcy in 1894. His next large scale work, The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (aka Those Extraordinary Twins), brought about Twains sense of irony, though it has been misconstrued. There were parallels between this work and Twains financial failings, notably his desire to escape his current constraints and become a different person.Twains next venture was straight fiction called Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc and dedicated it to his wife. Twain had long said that this was the work he was most proud of despite the criticism he received for it. The book had been a dream of Twains for a very long time and he eventually thought it to be the work to save his publishing company. His financial adviser, Henry Huttleston Rogers, squashed that idea as he got Twain out of that business all together, but the book was published nonetheless.Twains wife died in 1904 and after the appropriate time was allowed to publish some works that his wife, a de facto editor and sensor throughout his life, had looked down upon. Of these works, The Mysterious Stranger, which pits the presence of Satan, aka No. 44, in various situations where the moral sense of human kind. This particular work was not published in Twains life, so there were three versions found in his manuscripts made between 1897 and 1905: the Hannibal version, the Eseldorf version, and the Print Shop version. Confusion between the versions led to an extensive publication of a jumbled version, and only recently have the original versions as Twain wrote them become available. The most popular part of The Mysterious Stranger features the devils definition of humor.Twains last work was his autobiography, which he dictated and thought would be most entertaining if he went off on whims and tangents in non-sequential order. Some archivists and compilers had a problem with this and rearranged the biography into a more conventional form, thereby eliminating some of Twains humor and the flow of the book.During this tour of Europe and the Middle East he wrote a collection of widely popular travel letters which would, in 1869, be compiled into his book The Innocents Abroad. Here Twain met Charles Langdon, who showed him a picture of his sister Olivia. Twain claims to have fallen in love at first sight; in 1868, Twain met her. Twain was editing a daily Buffalo, New York newspaper for a few months when the two, a year later, became engaged, then married in February 1870 in Elmira, New York. In Buffalo, Olivia gave birth to a son, Langdon, who died of diphtheria after 19 months. In 1871 Twain moved his family to West Hartford, Connecticut, the site of his established residence. There Olivia gave birth to three daughters: Susy, Clara, and Jean. While living in Hartford, Twain became good friends with fellow author William Dean Howells. Twain made a second tour of Europe, summarized and recorded in the 1880 book, A Tramp Abroad. He returned to America in 1900, having paid off his debts to his old firm. The Clemens' marriage lasted for 34 years until Olivia's death in 1904. In 1906 he began his autobiography in the North American Review. Oxford University issued him a Doctorate of Literature a year later. Twain outlived Jean and Susy. He passed through a period of deep depression, which began in 1896 when he received word on a lecture tour in England that his favorite daughter, Susy, had died of meningitis. His wife's death in 1904, and the loss of a second daughter, Jean, on December 24, 1909, deepened his gloom.Adventures of Huckleberry FinnAdventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) is commonly accounted as one of the first Great American Novels. It was also one of the first major American novels ever written using Local Color Realism or the vernacular, or common speech, being told in the first person by the eponymous Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, best friend of Tom Sawyer (hero of three other Mark Twain books). The book was first published in 1884.The book is noted for its innocent young protagonist, its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River, and its sober and often scathing look at entrenched attitudes, particularly racism, of the time. The drifting journey of Huck and his friend Jim, a runaway slave, down the Mississippi River on their raft may be one of the most enduring images of escape and freedom in all of American literature.Although the book has been popular with young readers since its publication, and taken as a sequel to the comparatively innocuous The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (which had no particular social message), it has also been the continued object of study by serious literary critics. Although the Southern society it satirized was already a quarter-century in the past by the time of publication, the book immediately became controversial, and has remained so to this day. Based in the mid 1800's before the Civil War, the novel chronicles the adventures of and relationship between Huckleberry Finn and the runaway slave Jim, as they flee south on the Mississippi River. During that journey, the pair have a series of adventures that bring them closer together and expose them to the flaws in Southern culture.Twain initially conceived of the work as a companion to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that would follow Huck Finn through adulthood. Beginning with a chapter he had deleted from the earlier novel, Twain began work on a manuscript he originally titled Huckleberry Finn's Autobiography. Twain worked on the manuscript off and on for the next several years, ultimately abandoning his original plan of following Huck's development into adulthood. Upon completion, the novel's title closely paralleled its predecessor's: "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade)"Unlike The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn does not have the definite article "the" as a part of its proper title. Writer Philip Young has hypothesized that this absence represents the fundamentally uncompleted nature of Huck's adventures -- while Tom's adventures were completed (at least at the time) at the end of his novel, Huck's narrative ends with his stated intention to head West.Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is about the adventures faced by Huck and Jim, a runaway slave, as they travel down the Mississippi River on a raft. The book opens shortly after the final scenes of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The opening chapters recapture the playful, lighthearted spirit of Tom Sawyer, with Tom, Huck, Joe Harper, and other boys forming a gang of robbers. The narrative takes a darker tone with the return of Pap Finn, Huck's drunken father. A judge rejects Judge Thatcher and the Widow Douglas' attempt to be appointed Huck's legal guardian, and Pap goes on a drinking binge to celebrate. Now Huck's entire fortune will be in his hands. Pap removes Huck to a deserted cabin three miles up-river, to keep a close eye on him. Huck fakes his own death, and escapes in a canoe to Jackson's Island. On his third day on the island, Huck stumbles upon Jim, whom he knows from Hannibal. It turns out that Jim has run away from his master, to seek his freedom. After several weeks, Huck gets word that the island is about to be searched for Jim. The two pack up some things, and head down the river on a raft. Their plan is to head for Cairo, Illinois, where they will take a steamboat up the Ohio River to the free states. Shortly afterward, they discover that they have passed the small town of Cairo in the fog, so the two continue their journey downriver. After numerous experiences, they come upon two swindlers, known as the King and Duke. The King and the Duke stage a "Shakespearean Revival" in some of the towns the four come upon, and they take in over $400. The King and the Duke decide to impersonate the brothers of the deceased Peter Wilks in order to reap his inheritance; this escapade eventually backfires. The four travelers take to their raft and continue the journey down the Mississippi. At this point, Huck grapples with his guilt over helping a slave escape from his master. He begins to write a letter to Miss Watson, Jim's owner, but tears it up after recalling how Jim has become his good friend. He decides to make sure that Jim achieves his freedom. Little does he know that the King has sold Jim for $40 behind Huck's back. Huck discovers that Jim has been sold to a family named Phelps, and goes to their farm, where he is mistaken for their relative Tom. It turns out that Tom is Huck's friend Tom Sawyer. On the road to the Phelps', Huck meets Tom and explains that he wants to help Jim get his freedom. Tom agrees to take part in this plan. At the Phelps', Tom introduces himself as Sid Sawyer, his half-brother. Jim is being imprisoned in a cabin on the farm. Tom and Huck dig their way into the cabin, and smuggle in food and other things. At the right moment, the three escape from the farm and head to the raft. Tom is hit by a bullet during the escape, and a doctor is found to treat him. The next day, Huck returns to the Phelps, and Tom and Jim, with his hands tied behind his back, are soon also brought to the farm. It comes out at the end that Jim has been a free man for two months already, when his owner, Miss Watson, died and freed him in her will. Tom knew about his freedom, but went through the entire scheme for the "adventure of it." It also comes out that Pap Finn has been murdered. At the end of the book, Huck doesn't want to be adopted by Tom's Aunt Sally, and decides to "light out for the Territories ahead of the rest." Twain's intended irony is that these Territories, soon after the events of the book, were the scene of great bloodshed over the issue of whether or not to outlaw slavery in their society.Major themesFamily is one of the most important themes in the book. The attempt by Huck's father to gain custody of him in order to steal the money that Huck and Tom had found in the previous book precipitates his flight, Huck stages his own murder to get away. One of the major plot devices in the book is Jim's hiding the death of Huck's father from him. As they travel the river, Huck is frequently involved with families who attempt to adopt him.Another theme is the life on the Mississippi River, alternately idyllic and threatening. In true picaresque fashion, Huck and Jim encounter all the varieties of humanity as they travel: murderers, thieves, confidence men, good people and hypocrites.In the middle of the story, Mark Twain comments on the irrationality of pride and honor, as Huck sees brutal, cold-blooded murders committed by two feuding families. Later on, a Southern aristocrat coldly kills a drunken man who has been yelling empty threats at him, and the village turns the incident into a sort of circus, ignoring the dead man's daughter while trying to start a lynch mob, which quickly disintegrates after being mocked by the murderer himself. The "Dauphin" and the "Duke", two seemingly-innocuous (in some ways) confidence men are infamous characters of the novel who attempt to con three orphaned girls out of their late father's life savings. Towards the end of the book, they are tarred and feathered, and carried out of town on a rail, symbolizing how equally or more evil a village of people can be, given the magnitude of the response relative to that of the suspected crime.Much of the section detailing the feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons can be interpreted as an attack on exaggerated or melodramatic romanticism. The poem "Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots" by Emmeline Grangerford, two-thirds of which details what Stephen Dowling Bots did not die of, is an example. The whole Grangerford parlor was filled with kitsch. Also, Emmeline Gragerford's paintings, which had titles that all ended in "Alas", were also a parody of this. Emmeline Grangerford was modeled after Julia A. Moore, a notoriously bad poet known as "The Sweet Singer of Michigan".It is commonly said that the beginning and ending of the book, the parts in which Tom Sawyer appears as a character, detract from its overall impact. Others feel Tom serves to start the story off and to bring it to a conclusion, and that Tom's ridiculous schemes have the paradoxical effect of providing a framework of 'reality' around the mythical river voyage. Much of the boyhood innocence and romantic depictions of nature occur in the first sixteen chapters and the last five, while the middle of the story shows the harsh realities of antebellum society.Another theme is Huck's gradual acceptance of Jim as a man, strong, brave, generous, and wise (though realistically portrayed as imperfect).Its themes on religion are almost as strong as its race theme. Huck himself comes across as religious but having trouble believing in God: although he tries to pray, he finds it to be a waste of time. Later in the book, he encounters the dilemma of whether or not to steal Jim out of slavery; he is forced to reckon with the fact that, according to his society, helping a slave escape will condemn him to Hell. His famous quote "All right, then, I'll GO to hell", is a direct attack by Twain on the religious support of slavery in the U.S. Huck comes across as one of the most unbiased, open-minded characters of popular literature as he continually questions his own motivation and life in general throughout the book. While he may not be pious, he does have a strong sense of right and wrong and often acts out of moral conviction.In another amusing commentary on 19th century society, Twain includes the "Dauphin" character, a deluded, unemployed drunkard who insists upon being addressed as "Your Majesty" and claims to be the "Lost Dauphin", the long-lost son of Louis XVI and Queen Marie-Antoinette, who were both executed by French republicans in 1793. Their son, Louis XVII, actually died in a republican jail in 1795, but many pretenders appeared all over the world claiming to have been the young boy-king of France. By the middle of the century their claims were becoming increasingly absurd and unbelievable.Social values and criticismAlthough the Concord, Massachusetts library banned the book immediately after its publication because of its "tawdry subject manner" and "the coarse, ignorant language in which it was narrated", the San Francisco Chronicle came quickly to its defense on March 29, 1885:"Running all through the book is the sharpest satire on the ante-bellum estimate of the slave. Huckleberry Finn, the son of a worthless, drunken, poor white man, is troubled with many qualms of conscience because of the part he is taking in helping the negro to gain his freedom. This has been called exaggerated by some critics, but there is nothing truer in the book."[1]In the United States, occasional efforts have been made to restrict the reading of the book. In addition to its Concord ban, it has, at various times, also been:excluded from the juvenile sections of the Brooklyn Public library and other librariesremoved from reading lists due to alleged racism (e.g., in March of 1995 it was removed from the reading list of 10th grade English classes at National Cathedral School in Washington, DC, according to the Washington Post; and a New Haven, Connecticut correspondent to Banned Books Online reports it has been removed from a public school program there as well)removed from school programs at the behest of groups maintaining that its frequent use of the word nigger (212 times overall) implies that the book as a whole is racist, despite what defenders maintain is the overwhelmingly anti-racist plot of the book, its satirical nature, and the anachronism of applying current definitions of polite speech to past times.Russell Baker wrote:"The people whom Huck and Jim encounter on the Mississippi are drunkards, murderers, bullies, swindlers, lynches, thieves, liars, frauds, child abusers, numbskulls, hypocrites, windbags and traders in human flesh. All are white. The one man of honor in this phantasmagoria is 'Nigger Jim,' as Twain called him to emphasize the irony of a society in which the only true gentleman was held beneath contempt."Ralph Ellison was impressed with how clearly Twain allowed Jim's "dignity and human capacity" to emerge in the novel. According to Ellison,"Huckleberry Finn knew, as did Mark Twain, that Jim was not only a slave but a human being [and] a symbol of humanity . . . and in freeing Jim, Huck makes a bid to free himself of the conventionalized evil [i.e., slavery] taken for civilization by the town."Albert Bigelow Paine's 1912 Twain biography marks the first use of the term "Nigger Jim," a phrase not attributed to Clemens, causing its rise in usage in short-hand descriptions of the character in critical essays.The American Library Association ranked Huckleberry Finn the fifth most frequently challenged (in the sense of attempting to ban) book in the United States during the 1990s.A character in the 1969 Nero Wolfe novel Death of a Dude by Rex Stout opines that "All right, then, I'll go to hell," Huck's pronouncement on his own fate for his decision to help Jim escape, cited above, is the single greatest sentence in American literature.