The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) 


Mark Twain, Chapters Nine to Sixteen, pp. 59- 116 

Section 1: What is Huck's Situation at the beginning of the action?

Section 2: What is the relation between Huck's situation and America's situation in 1876?

Section 3: What does Huck need? What psychological obstacles stand in his way? How can they be overcome? What new morality is Huck learning from Jim?

Huck's Escape:

- Deconstructing Race: How have Huck's attitudes about blacks been formed? (conscience)

- Jim and Huck on Jackson's Island (Twain's use of the uncanny to represent psychological states.)

- Jim and Huck on the Big River (Mood shift)

  • Life on the River (75)
  • Slave Morality (vs. conventional morality) (75-76) Is right and wrong as simple as the Widow Douglas would have it when she says that stealing is always wrong?
  • The Wrecked Steamboat (76-81): What is happening on it? What kind of folk do they run into every time the raft brushes up against civilization? How do Huck and Jim escape? Why does Huck decide to save the rapscallions on the boat? (81) Twain's point?
  • Huck's Orphan Story #2: about pap and mam and sis and Miss Hooker stranded on the Walter Scott.
  • Huck and Jim on King Sollermun and 'dat chile dat he 'uz gwyne to chop in two' (87) What is the point of this Bible story? What is Jim's interpretation of it? Why does Twain include this story at this moment in Huck's development?
  • What is Jim's problem with "Polly-voo-franzy"? (89-90) (Isn't it strange that a Duke and Dauphin will join Huck and Jim on the raft a little farther dowriver? What is Twain up to?)

- To Cairo and Beyond (Huck's Crisis: Fog and Lies) (How long can this friendship last?) 

  • "WE judged that three nights more would fetch us to Cairo, at the bottom of Illinois, where the Ohio River comes in, and that was what we was after. We would sell the raft and get on a steamboat and go way up the Ohio amongst the free States, and then be out of trouble." (91)
  • Jim realizes that he has passed Cairo only at the end of the chapter. (Realization)
  • What prevents Huck and Jim from finding the mouth to the Ohio River? Interpret the symbolism of The Fog (92) What is the most terrifying aspect of it? What is it like for Huck to be lost in it?
  • How does Huck feel when he is reunited with Jim (93) 
  • "Is I me, or who is I?"
  • Jim discovers Huck's Lie (95) What distance does Huck still have to travel to have a real relationship? How can he get there?
  • "It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger; but I done it, and I warn't ever sorry for it afterwards, neither. I didn't do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn't done that one if I'd a knowed it would make him feel that way."
  • (Tina Morrison on her childhood bi-racial friendships.)
  • The Raftmen's Episode (96-116) was added in later editions of the novel. (Dick Albright's Haunted Barrel) (Charles William Allbright)
  • "... he would buy his wife, which was owned on a farm close to where Miss Watson lived; and then they would both work to buy the two children.... saying he would steal his children -- children that belonged to a man I didn't even know; a man that hadn't ever done me no harm."
  • Huck's First Crisis of Conscience (110) (Huck's lie) (111) What is Huck's conclusion about right and wrong? "always do whichever come handiest at the time"
  • Cairo Passed (114)
  • The Raft is Smashed  (115)

Paragraph 3: What does Huck need? What psychological obstacles stand in his way? How can they be overcome? What new morality is Huck learning?