MARK TWAIN

(1835-1910)

Fact File

Mark twain's life: Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Hannibal, Missouri. His formal schooling ended early, and having learned the printing trade he become a journalist, writing for papers in Hannibal, St. Louis, Philadelphia and New York. After four years he returned to the Mississippi where he became a river pilot and he took his penname from the Leaderman's call for two fathoms. From 1865 he began to establish his success as a story teller and this was consolidated by "The innocents Abroad".

He settled in Connecticut with his wife and the 1870s saw some of his best 16516o1419q works. However the last two decades of his life was full of financial and family problems. His son and two daughters died and the publishing house in which he was partner collapsed. His literary success and popularity in America and abroad where contrasted with emotional complexities, tragic losses and business disappointments.

Work

"The Innocents Abroad"

"The Gilded Age"

"A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"

"Life on the Mississippi"

"The Adventures of Tom Sawyer"

"The Prince and the Pauper"

"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"

"The Mysterious Stranger"

"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"

The story is one of moment instead of situation. The author's own summary of the narrative gist of his story in "Life on the Mississippi" states it as simply as possible:

"The book is a story which details passages in the life of an ignorant village boy, Huck Finn, son of the town drunkard of my time out West, there. He has run away from his persecuting father, and from a persecuting good widow who wishes to make a nice, truth-telling, respectable boy of him; and with him a slave of the widow'' has also escaped. They have found a fragment of lumber-raft( it is high water and dead summer-time), and are floating down the river by night, and hiding in the willows by day-bound for Cairo, whence the Negro will seek freedom in the heart of the free states. But in the fog they pass Cairo without knowing it".

Critical Remarks

-"Huckleberry Finn abounds in passages which specify the influence of natural objects along the great river in purifying the feeling and thought of Huck; over and over again Huck intimates his scene of a beneficent society in Nature".

-"Huck's character in the story has to carry so much meaning that it is at least un plausible; he knows too much for any boy, although so ignorant of what commonly passes for knowledge. But the realism of the book is so vivid that a reader hardly stops to question the conception. Huck's adventures are told in the first person, in a style so suited to his character that he seems real." (American Literature- Barron's  Educational Series)

Point of view

1^st person narrative.

Literary Analysis

Being continuously taught what is "right" and what is "wrong" Huck decides to give Jim up. In spite of his own feeling, the boy wants to act according to the rules of the society he lives in. He had to fight with his conscience continuously because the morality of the society and the church ask him to report on the runaway slave. But Jim is the man whom he had come to love as his father and who said Jim won't ever forget you Huck; wou's the bes' fren' Jim's ever had".

In Huck's mind the conception of "right" and "wrong" has no clear meaning, but his behavior is in accordance with any friend's feeling. Therefore he acts on impulse not only protecting Jim but also lying in order to save him.

Twain's criticism is indirectly made because he presents the spoiling of a child's heart by prejudices and false moral conventions. Being deeply confused of what "right" and "wrong" really means Huck acts on impulse and his decision is the right one. But was it the right one, thinking of the Southern society and its rules?

Being the actor and the narrator at the same time, the whole dramatic moment when a man's life is to be saved or not, turns into quite a funny one because Huck, a boy, likes to make fun of everything. He is quite unaware of the tension and the difficulty of the moment and he enjoys himself by making the two slave hunters as ridiculous as possible. Nevertheless Huck is still troubled by a sense of wickedness in breaking society's comandments.

This conflict is resolved as the two fugitives float down the great river together. The Mississippi to whose current they commit themselves is Nature; from it Huck makes various excursions into the Southern society along its shores. As they go farther south, these excursions penetrate more and more deeply into the heart of a darkness of prejudices and pretence. At the end of the journey Huck has fully accepted the fact that he shares a common humanity with Jim which overrides any artificial differences which Southern society may try to maintain. While he shares such things with Jim, Huck finds also in his companionship with a fugitive slave a reciprocation of human feelings and thoughts which he has never enjoyed in the village.

So having experienced these feelings Huck chooses to feel socially guilty rather than give his friend up:

"Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on: s'pose you'd  's done right and give Jim up, you would feel better than you do now? No, I says I, I'd feel bad - I'd feel just the same way you do now."

By choosing Huck as the narrator Mark Twain created quite a revolution in the novel. In the speech of Huck Finn, Twain created a new literary language in

colloquial American language, which influenced a whole generation of American writers.

Suggested Topics for Composition

Imagine a dialogue between Huck and Jim after the slave hunters had gone.

Present Huck's problem of conscience( no more than 150 words).

What would you do if you were Huck? Recreate the scene.