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1. Here a captive heart busted. 2. Here a poor prisoner, forsook by the world and friends, fretted his sorrowful life. 3. Here a lonely heart broke, and a worn spirit went to its rest, after thirty-seven years of solitary captivity.
4. Here, homeless and friendless, after thirty-seven years of bitter captivity, perished a noble stranger, natural son of Louis XIV.
“How'd you say he got shot?” “He had a dream,” I says, “and it shot him.” “Singular dream,” he says.
Then they all agreed that Jim had acted very well, and was deserving to have some notice took of it, and reward. So every one of them promised, right out and hearty, that they wouldn't cuss him no more.
But Tom, he was so proud and joyful, he just couldn't hold in, and his tongue just went it—she a-chipping in, and spitting fire all along, and both of them going it at once, like a cat convention; and she says: “Well, you get all the enjoyment you can out of it now, for mind I tell you if I catch you meddling with him again—”
But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.
Huckleberry Finn is above all a novel of low company—of people who are so far down in the social scale that they can get along only by their wits. In 1885 the Concord Public Library banned Huckleberry Finn from its shelves. It was not altogether mistaken when it described the humor as “coarse,” and said that the substance was “rough, coarse and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.”
Vagrancy is his first freedom. He does not even choose to go traipsing down the Mississippi with Jim, who just happens to be on Jackson's Island when Huck gets there. The book is one happening after another; Huck happens to fall in with a runaway slave instead of living by the book with Tom Sawyer. As Pap Finn chooses the mud, so Huck chooses the river. But didn't the river really choose him?
A boy is up against forces bigger than himself, the greatest of which can be his inexperience. So he has to play “smart.” But the smarter the boy, the more fatalistic he is; he knows who runs things. Wary about people, Huck weaves his way in and out of so many hazards and dangers that we love him for the dangers he has passed. He is our Ulysses, he has come through. Yet coming up from the bottom, he has none of Tom Sawyer's foolish pride; the “going” for this boy has become life itself, and there is eventually no place for him to go except back to Tom Sawyer's fun and games.
Mark Twain, fully for the first time, knew how to let life carry its own rhythms. The funny thing is that he did not particularly intend to do this. He put away the manuscript for several years after writing the scene at the end of chapter 16 in which the steamboat, showing its “red-hot iron teeth,” runs the raft down. When he finally took the book up again, to describe the comedy and horror of the Grangerfords' existence, he was tougher on the society along the river than he had ever expected to be, for starting with chapter 17 he had to describe not only the folly of “quality” folk like the
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There is a famous speech by Colonel Sherburn right after this in which he ridicules the crowd that has come to lynch him. The speech is wonderful in its lordly contempt for the townspeople, but of course it is not Sherburn but Mark Twain speaking when Sherburn tells them off. The crowd admiringly watching the man in the “big white fur stovepipe hat” acting out the killing (then getting their bottles out to reward him) shows Mark Twain the artist at his best. In this terrifying scene, one of the most powerful weapons ever directed at the complacency of democracy in America, life becomes farce
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