In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Twain sends Huck and the escaped slave Jim down the Mississippi on a raft. The river is a little bit of everything in the novel. At the beginning it floods, killing livestock and people, including Huck’s father. Jim is using the river to escape to freedom, but his “escape” is paradoxical since it carries him deeper and deeper into slave territory. The river is both danger and safety, since the relative isolation from land and detection is offset by the perils of river travel on a makeshift conveyance.
