The story described in this novel happened before the American Civil War. Through the story of a white boy named Huck helping the slave Jim escape, the author describes all aspects of life in the Midwest of the United States in the mid-Kloc-0/9th century, exposes and satirizes the ugly reality of American civilized society, and especially angrily condemns and criticizes the decadent slavery system. The ideological tendency of the work is embodied in the protagonist Huck.
Huck was a homeless tramp since he was a child. He has no civilized education. He doesn't have to go to church to pray or wear decent clothes to learn those elegant manners. He likes to live independently. He is a free child. Later, the kind widow Douglas adopted him, taught him to read and sent him to school, hoping to teach him to be a gentle and decent "model" child and make him a "civilized person" in the future. However, Huck hates ordinary people's plain life and hypocritical manners. He thinks that life is "too boring" and it is simply "suffering all day". He kept playing truant and sleeping in the Woods, saying that he would rather go to "hell" as long as he could "change the air". Huck doesn't think highly of the high society envied by the world. Not only does he not want to be a decent gentleman, but even if he is with "people with status", he will feel itchy all over. He kept the curiosity and sensitivity peculiar to a simple child around him, judged whether it was right or not by his own personal feelings, and even questioned the sacred religious creed: "If a person can pray for something, why can't Yoken Wayne earn back the money he lost selling pork?" Why can't the widow get her silver snuff bottle back? Why is Miss Watson fat? No, I thought, praying is meaningless. "Huck finally escaped from that environment, because he couldn't stand the dead life and civilized education and sought his ideal free life. In Mark Twain's works, Huck is out of tune with this rigid social norm, which makes him avoid being corroded by the environment, keep his simple, honest and kind personality and clear and sensitive mind, and become more innocent and lovely.
However, as a 12-year-old child who grew up in such a society, he could not be unaffected by the environment. The author faithfully reflects the contradiction in Huck's thought and strengthens the authenticity of this character-when Huck met Jim on the Mississippi River and fled with him on a raft, he had to face the severe social and moral problems at that time-how to deal with racial discrimination and slavery. At this time, the traditional ideas imposed on his young mind by social environment clashed fiercely with his upright and kind character. In this fierce ideological struggle, Huck's rebellious character really grew up.
Jim fled to escape the tragic fate of being sold to the south. At that time, slavery was dominant in the southern part of the United States, which was much more cruel than the central part. In plantations in the south, slaves were treated as servants of cattle and horses, and even the strongest laborers would bleed to death after seven or eight years of torture. As Mark Twain said, "... for us whites and blacks, the farms in the south are pure hell, and there is no milder word to describe them." It is out of pity and sympathy that Huck is willing to help a man who will be thrown into "hell" to fight for freedom. But at first he didn't regard Jim as a companion with dignity. He is always making fun of him, making fun of him. Later, he found that Jim was kind and honest; Treat yourself sometimes as sincerely as a friend, and sometimes as concerned as a father; It is found that he is "like a white man" and "thinking about his family", and as a real person, he has the same dignity as a white man. Therefore, Huck denied the racial prejudice instilled in him by society and made his own judgment that Jim was "a good black man". Once, because of a prank, Jim complained that Huck was ashamed and "almost wanted to kiss his feet." After that, Huck never made fun of Jim again, and they became bosom friends.
However, with the approach of the "free state", the concept of slavery began to torment Huck again and again. His so-called "conscience" warned him from time to time that kidnapping the owner's property was a big crime. Whenever he heard Jim cheering for freedom, he felt "trembling and feverish". Before, school teaching always haunted him like a plague, and something always said to him, "Whoever, like you, has done something like kidnapping runaway blacks, has to go down to the underworld and go to the frying pan." In front of Huck, telling on Jim is the "right way" in line with God's will, while helping him escape is the evil way to "hell". Huck shivered at the fork in the road.
Huck's psychological contradiction truly reflects the shadow cast by the concept of slavery on a kind child's mind before the Civil War. Mark Twain had such a personal experience. When Mark Twain was 6 years old, his father took part in the trial of three abolitionists who instigated slaves to flee to the north and served as a magistrate. At that time, many local people were present, threatening three white people again and again to pull them out and hang them. Finally, in the cheers of the public, the judge sentenced them to 12 years of hard labor. Twain wrote in his note 1895: "In those days of slavery, the whole town praised this thing, that is, the inviolability of slave property. Helping to steal a horse or a cow is a despicable crime, while helping a hunted slave, … or hesitating to report him immediately is a more despicable crime, which brings an indelible stain.
It is understandable that slave chasers hold this view, because there are considerable rewards; But the poor hold this idea ... and their enthusiasm and intransigence are beyond our understanding today. At that time, this concept seemed to me to be taken for granted; It's natural for Huck ... to agree with it, even if it seems so absurd today. "It is not difficult to see that slavery was the foundation of that civilized society at that time, and how difficult it would be for a white child to get rid of the bondage of slavery prejudice. Helping a black slave fight for freedom means a challenge to society. Huck must show courage to face his relatives, friends and even the whole society.
Huck's ideological struggle is quite painful. He once could not resist the condemnation of "conscience" and wrote a letter to Jim's master, Miss Watson, reporting Jim's whereabouts. However, he immediately remembered his harmonious and friendly life with Jim on the raft, Jim's care and love for him, and Jim affectionately called him "Baby" and "Old Jim's best friend in the world". Huck looked at the letter he had just written and felt very uneasy. The author wrote:
This is really a dilemma. I picked up the paper and held it in my hand. I'm sweating all over. Because I have to make up my mind to choose one of the two ways, and I can never go back on my word. This is what I can see clearly. I thought for a while, as if I couldn't breathe, and then I said to myself, "Well, go to hell," and then I tore it off at once.
This marks a complete break between Huck and slavery. He said, "From now on, I'm never going to turn over a new leaf." He doesn't want to follow the "right path" of the civilized world, nor does he want to be a "good thing" that people generally praise. He betrayed the hypocritical "God" and chose an "evil road" that was despised by society at that time. In fact, this road was the just road taken by the American people and bourgeois democratic forces against slavery at that time. Eventually it led to the civil war from 186 1 to 1865-the second bourgeois revolution in the United States. Of course, young Huck can't understand this great significance, but the author's intention is very obvious. He condemned slavery from the standpoint of bourgeois democracy.
During the journey of two fugitives seeking freedom, Huck visited cities and villages on both sides of the Mississippi River several times. This enables him to get in touch with society more widely and observe and understand what is happening there. During this trip, he also showed his rebellious character.
On one occasion, Huck was in distress on the river and was taken in by the Grangiffords. There, he witnessed the bloody struggle passed down from generation to generation between Grangiffords and Shepperson. The direct cause of the last fight was that Granci's daughter eloped with Shepson's son. As a result, Granci and his son died miserably in the struggle and were worthless. What the author describes here is actually the remnants of medieval feudal system in Europe. It happened in America in the19th century, which is really a satire on modern American civilization. In this experience, Huck was always a bystander, however, he silently expressed his hatred of this barbaric social phenomenon. Huck couldn't understand why these noble and well-behaved gentlemen would kill each other endlessly; When asked about the reasons for this generation's discord, neither side remembered. Huck was disgusted to see Glengifford and Shepperson sitting in the church with guns, listening to the priest talk about "love" and listening to them talk enthusiastically about their devotion to God. He thought, "people who go to church are almost always forced to go, but pigs are different." For Romeo and Juliet-style love, those noble gentlemen hold an attitude of hatred and disgust, but Huck is not. He inadvertently became the messenger of love, and he was sincerely happy to hear that the two lovers had escaped at night and had crossed the river to escape. Huck's thoughts run counter to secular ideas.
The king and the duke are two swindlers of Huck Lu Yu. They are mercenary and seek money by hook or by crook along the way. They even pretended to be Miss Mary's uncle and tried to seize her share of the inheritance. They cheated people's trust through nonsense and crying, got a bag of gold coins worth 6000 yuan, and auctioned all the industries and slaves of the original owner. It's not just these two swindlers who are greedy for money, but almost everyone in the town is. When the "king" and "duke" came to the public with a bag of gold coins, "everyone sat around the table" and "everyone looked at their eyes and licked their tongues." Mark Twain revealed here one of the most remarkable features of American civilization-money worship. But Huck is the only exception. He despises the axioms of the civilized world. In the fourth chapter of the novel, there is a story about Huck giving his money to Judge satchell for free. Later, when he saw that the two swindlers were so shameless and greedy, he said, "I have never seen such an insatiable guy as the king in my life." He simply swallowed everything. " At this time, Huck has not only looked on coldly in disgust, but bravely stood up to help orphans and the weak. He stole wallets from the houses of the "king" and "duke" and returned them to the original owners; He also revealed the true colors of these two guys to Miss Mary and tactfully arranged a plan to punish them.
Huck's journey is really an adventure. Time and time again, he got rid of the dangerous and ugly real world with disgust or fear. At the end of the novel, Huck said:
I think I have to sneak to Yinjiang before the two of them, because aunt Sally wants to take me as her adopted son and educate me, which I can't stand. I have tasted this taste for a long time.
This implicit ending implies a break between Huck and American traditional ideas.
Mark Twain, like Huck, hated the society at that time, but at the same time he had a glimmer of hope for the realization of the ideal of freedom. He once arranged an imaginary free state ode for Huck and Jim on his trip, but he also knew that this hope was slim, so he let them drift through the ode in the fog and never found this imaginary paradise. It is wise for the author to deal with this point. He didn't see a road to freedom in reality, nor did he show such a road for his little hero far-fetched. Therefore, Huck's character tends to be worldly. Huck's resistance to the real society can only be expressed as passive escape and helpless concealment, rather than strong resistance.
It is worth noting that Twain opposed nature and society and criticized reality from this angle. Compared with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn reveals a deeper and wider society. But as far as the weapon in the author's hand to criticize reality is concerned, it is still the same. He did not try to find the root of Huck's character from Huck's social experience, but compared children's nature-simplicity, kindness, longing for freedom and pursuing a better life with the civilized society that stifled this nature, emphasizing that his personality was not corroded by the ugly environment, and attributed the reason why he got rid of slavery prejudice to the fact that "a sound mind" defeated "a poisoned conscience". Similarly, the author interprets the essence of the civilized world-in fact, the real world of capitalism-as the rough corruption of nature by society and the rough corruption of human kindness by social morality. Therefore, the author describes the natural scenery on the Mississippi River and the fresh and harmonious life of Huck and Jim on the raft in a romantic and lyrical style-it symbolizes freedom. At the same time, he described the rudeness, cruelty, hypocrisy and greed of people on both sides of the Mississippi River with satirical and comic strokes-it represents a civilized society. This sharp contrast certainly makes the real society uglier and the author's ideal hero cuter, but it also brings some detached colors to Huck's image.
In shaping Huck's image, Mark Twain adopted a variety of artistic techniques, some of which are very distinctive. For example, the conception of the work is very unique. Twain inherited the tradition of legendary tramp novels, and let Huck play an innocent child who is very strange to the civilized world, let him walk into this world, wander all the way, observe this world with the unique curious and innocent eyes of children, and travel around this world with a feeling of not knowing everything around him. In this way, we can skillfully express the author's satire and criticism of the world through the scene reflected by the innocent eyes of the children, and also reflect how the protagonist gradually becomes familiar with the world and knows it during the trip. Some American critics call it "an educational journey to awakening", which is actually the natural maturity and development process of Huck's rebellious character.
The author is good at portraying characters by means of contrast and contrast, and attaches importance to the interaction between characters. Huck and Jim, the two most important characters in the novel. They are two people who share the same ideal of pursuing freedom, but have different personalities, different colors, different ages and different experiences. The similarities and differences between them make their personalities more distinct. With the loyalty, sincerity and kindness of old Jim, Huck's innocence, naughty and kindness are more prominent. With the friendship between Jim and Huck and the infection of Jim's noble personality on Huck, Huck's resistance to racial prejudice is more reasonable and touching. Huck's good friend Tom is a minor role in the book, but he is very meaningful to Huck's character. He is also a kind and witty boy. Unlike Huck, he was obsessed with martial arts novels and wanted to escape from social reality and pursue the thrilling heroic life in the book. Tom's Don Quixote fantasy just shows Huck's Sancho sobriety. Both of these characters have appeared in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In contrast, Tom is the little Tom in Tom Sawyer, and Huck grew up after extensive contact with society. His thoughts are more unconstrained and pragmatic. He not only violated the traditional moral concept, but also doubted the sacred creed in books.
The novel is written in the first person, and the whole book is written in the tone of the protagonist Huck's self-report. Huck told the reader a story seriously and kept telling his feelings. In this way, his character is not only reflected in a series of events he experienced, but also in his own detailed and vivid narrative. Huck's storytelling language is just in line with his country child's identity. His writing is simple and humorous, full of vivid spoken language and vulgar slang, without any traces of affectation, and extremely expressive. Just as Huck's personality is incompatible with civilized society, his language also greatly violates the norms of civilization and elegance. It is more appropriate to use this "rebellious" language to shape this little rebellious image without education.