Author: Mark Twain
Title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Narrator: Tom Parker
Publication Info: Blackstone Publishing, 2004 [originally published, 1884]
Other Books Read by the Same Author:

• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
• Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain
• The Innocents Abroad
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
• The Prince and the Pauper
• Pudd’nhead Wilson
• Tom Sawyer Abroad
• Tom Sawyer Detective

Summary/Review:

It’s curious that Mark Twain is relegated to the “folksy Americana” bucket when his most famous work is actually a scathing satire of the inherent violence of American culture.  The story is about a boy escaping horrific abuse from his father accompanied by a Black man, Jim, himself escaping slavery, America’s original sin.  It’s heartbreaking that by doing the morally correct thing – helping Jim escape – Huck has been conditioned by white supremacism to believe he is being sinful.  Jim is a wonderful, loving person – really the parent Huck deserves – but even then he has been conditioned to humor Huck as a white person by playing dumb at times.

Huck and Jim’s adventures take place on a raft drifting down the Mississippi River.  On their journey the encounter thieves, feuding families, and the horrors of nature and riverboat traffic.  The better part of the second half of the novel deals with two conmen who commandeer the raft, claiming to be a British duke and the French dauphin.  As they continue downriver, they involve Huck and Jim in their attempts to scam people in the towns they pass. For a novel set 180 years ago, there’s a lot about American people and culture that feels relevant to 2026.

While, in many ways this is a perfect book, I do feel the many cons of the Duke and the Dauphin kind of drag.  Also, late in the novel when Tom Sawyer joins Huck and makes elaborate plans to rescue Jim based on romantic novels it gets a bit too absurd.  The end of the novel has something of a deus ex machina, where Tom and Jim each have a bit of information that had they revealed earlier could’ve saved them a lot of trouble. And while the language of the novel is a verisimilitude of how people talked at the time, it was really difficult to hear the “n-word” repeated so often.

As Ernest Hemingway famously noted, this is a novel from which “modern American literature” originated. It was good to revisit this book especially in a time when the character of the American people is being severely tested.  We live in a time where children suffer abuse at the hands of the powerful and people are dehumanized, and just like the characters in this novel we are tasked with choosing what we’re told is the “Real American” way or doing what is morally good.

Rating: *****