The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn（中英文）.doc

Adventures of Huckleberry Finnis a book by Mark Twain, first published in England in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885. Considered as one of the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written in the vernacular, characterized by local color regionalism. It is told in the first person by Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, a friend of Tom Sawyer and narrator of two other Twain novels (Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective).The book is noted for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River. Satirizing a Southern antebellum society that had ceased to exist about twenty years before the work was published, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an often scathing look at entrenched attitudes, particularly racism.The work has been popular with readers since its publication and is taken as a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It has also been the continued object of study by serious literary critics. It was criticized upon release because of its coarse language and became even more controversial in the 20th century because of its perceived use of racial stereotypes and because of its frequent use of the racial slur "nigger", despite that the main protagonist, and the tenor of the book, is anti-racist.23 According to the January 20, 2011 Chase Cook/The Daily article, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn novel will be released in a new edition. Two words will be changed throughout the whole book, "injun" and "nigger" to "indian" and "slave". The book is being changed as quoted in the article, "only to make it viable to the 21st century". Plot summaryHuckleberry Finn, as depicted by E. W. Kemble in the original 1884 edition of the book.Life in St. PetersburgThe story begins in fictional St. Petersburg, Missouri, on the shores of the Mississippi River, sometime between 1835 (when the first steamboat sailed down the Mississippi12) and 1845. Two young boys, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, have each come into a considerable sum of money as a result of their earlier adventures (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer). Huck has been placed under the guardianship of the Widow Douglas, who, together with her sister, Miss Watson, are attempting to "sivilize (sic)" him. Huck appreciates their efforts, but finds civilized life confining. In the beginning of the story, Tom Sawyer appears briefly, helping Huck escape at night from the house, past Miss Watson's slave, Jim. They meet up with Tom Sawyer's self-proclaimed gang, who plot to carry out adventurous crimes. Life is changed by the sudden appearance of Huck's shiftless father "Pap", an abusive parent and drunkard. Although Huck is successful in preventing his Pap from acquiring his fortune, Pap forcibly gains custody of Huck and the two move to the backwoods where Huck is kept locked inside his father's cabin. Equally dissatisfied with life with his father, Huck escapes from the cabin, elaborately fakes his own death, and sets off down the Mississippi River, where he meets Jim.The Floating House and Huck as a GirlWhile living quite comfortably in the wilderness along the Mississippi, Huck happily encounters Miss Watson's slave Jim on an island called Jackson's Island, and Huck learns that he has also run away, after he overheard Miss Watson acknowledging that she intended to sell Jim downriver, where conditions for slaves were even harsher, because he would bring a price of $800.Jim is trying to make his way to Cairo, Illinois and then to Ohio, a free state, so he can buy his family's freedom. At first, Huck is conflicted over whether to tell someone about Jim's running away, but as they travel together and talk in depth, Huck begins to know more about Jim's past and his difficult life. As these talks continue, Huck begins to change his opinion about people, slavery, and life in general. This continues throughout the rest of the novel.Huck and Jim take up in a cavern on a hill on Jackson's Island to wait out a storm. When they can, they scrounge around the river looking for food, wood, and other items. One night, they find a raft they will eventually use to travel down the Mississippi. Later, they find an entire house floating down the river and enter it to grab what they can. Entering one room, Jim finds a man lying dead on the floor, shot in the back while apparently trying to ransack the house. He refuses to let Huck see the man's face.To find out the latest news in the area, Huck dresses as a girl and goes into town. He enters the house of a woman new to the area, thinking she won't recognize him. As they talk, she tells Huck there is a $300 reward for Jim, who is accused of killing Huck. She first becomes suspicious when he threads a needle incorrectly. Her suspicions are confirmed after she puts Huck through a series of tests. She cleverly tricks him into revealing he is a boy, but allows him to run off. He returns to the island and tells Jim of the manhunt, and the two load up the raft and leave the island.The Grangerfords and the ShepherdsonsHuck and Jim's raft is swamped by a passing steamship, separating the two. Huck is given shelter by the Grangerfords, a prosperous local family. He becomes friends with Buck Grangerford, a boy about his age, and learns that the Grangerfords are engaged in a 30-year blood feud against another family, the Shepherdsons. The Grangerfords and Shepherdsons go to church. Both families bring guns to continue the feud, despite the church's preachings on brotherly love.The vendetta comes to a head when Buck's sister, Sophia Grangerford, elopes with Harney Shepherdson. In the resulting conflict, all the Grangerford males from this branch of the family are shot and killed, although Grangerfords elsewhere survive to carry on the feud. Upon seeing Buck's corpse, Huck is too devastated to write about everything that happened. However, Huck does describe how he narrowly avoids his own death in the gunfight, later reuniting with Jim and the raft and together fleeing farther south on the Mississippi River.The Duke and the KingFurther down the river, Jim and Huck rescue two cunning grifters, who join Huck and Jim on the raft. The younger of the two swindlers, a man of about thirty, introduces himself as a son of an English duke (the Duke of Bridgewater) and his father's rightful successor. The older one, about seventy, then trumps the Duke's claim by alleging that he is actually the Lost Dauphin, the son of Louis XVI and rightful King of France. He continually misprounounces the duke's title as "Bilgewater" in conversation.The Duke and the King then join Jim and Huck on the raft, committing a series of confidence schemes on the way south. To allow for Jim's presence, they print fake bills for an escaped slave; and later they paint him up entirely in blue and call him the "Sick Arab". On one occasion they arrive in a town and advertise a three-night engagement of a play which they call "The Royal Nonesuch". The play turns out to be only a couple of minutes of hysterical cavorting, not worth anywhere near the 50 cents the townsmen were charged to see it.On the afternoon of the first performance, a drunk called Boggs arrives in town and makes a nuisance of himself by going around threatening a southern gentleman by the name of Colonel Sherburn. Sherburn comes out and warns Boggs that he can continue threatening him up until exactly one o'clock. At one o'clock, Boggs continues and Colonel Sherburn kills him. Somebody in the crowd, whom Sherburn later identifies as Buck Harkness, cries out that Sherburn should be lynched. They all head up to Colonel Sherburn's gate, where they are met by Sherburn, who is standing on his porch carrying a loaded rifle. He causes them to back down, by making a defiant speech telling them about the essential cowardice of "Southern justice". The only lynching to be done here, says Sherburn, will be in the dark, by men wearing masks.By the third night of "The Royal Nonesuch", the townspeople are ready to take their revenge; but the Duke and the King have already skipped town, and together with Huck and Jim, they continue down the river. Once they are far enough away, the two grifters test the next town, and decide to impersonate two brothers of Peter Wilks, a recently deceased man of property. Using an absurd English accent, the King manages to convince nearly all the townspeople that he is one of the brothers, a preacher just arrived from England, while the Duke pretends to be a deaf-mute to match accounts of the other brother. One man in town is certain that they are a fraud and confronts them on the matter, but the crowd refuse to support him. Afterwards, the Duke, out of fear, suggests to the King that they should cut and run. The King boldly states his intention to continue to liquidate Wilks' estate, saying, "Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority in any town?"Huck likes Wilks' daughters, who treat him with kindness and courtesy, so he tries to thwart the grifters' plans by stealing back the inheritance money. However, when he is in danger of being discovered, he has to hide it in Wilks' coffin, which is buried the next morning without Huck knowing whether the money has been found or not. The arrival of two new men who seem to be the real brothers throws everything into confusion when none of their signatures match the one on record. (The deaf-mute brother, who is said to do the correspondence, has his arm in a sling and cannot currently write.) The townspeople devise a test, which requires digging up the coffin to check. When the money is found in Wilks' coffin, the Duke and the King are able to escape in the confusion. They manage to rejoin Huck and Jim on the raft to Huck's utter despair, since he had thought he had escaped them. Jim's escapeAfter the four fugitives have drifted far enough from the town, the King takes advantage of Huck's temporary absence to sell his interest in the "escaped" slave Jim for forty dollars. Outraged by this betrayal, Huck rejects the advice of his "conscience", which continues to tell him that in helping Jim escape to freedom, he is stealing Miss Watson's property. Accepting that "All right, then, I'll go to hell!", Huck resolves to free Jim.Jim is being held at the plantation of Silas and Sally Phelps, Tom's aunt and uncle. Since Tom is expected for a visit, Huck is mistaken for Tom. He plays along, hoping to find Jim's location and free him. When Huck intercepts Tom on the road and tells him everything, Tom decides to join Huck's scheme, pretending to be his younger half-brother Sid. Jim has also told the household about the two grifters and the new plan for "The Royal Nonesuch", so this time the townspeople are ready for them. The Duke and King are captured by the townspeople, and are tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail.Rather than simply sneaking Jim out of the shed where he is being held, Tom develops an elaborate plan to free him, involving secret messages, hidden tunnels, a rope ladder sent in Jim's food, and other elements from popular novels,13 including a note to the Phelps warning them of a gang planning to steal their runaway slave. During the resulting pursuit, Tom is shot in the leg. Jim remains with him rather than completing his escape, risking recapture. Huck has long known Jim was "white on the inside". Although the doctor admires Jim's decency, he betrays him to a passing skiff, and Jim is captured while sleeping and returned to the Phelpses. ConclusionAfter Jim's recapture, events quickly resolve themselves. Tom's Aunt Polly arrives and reveals Huck's and Tom's true identities. Tom announces that Jim is a free man: Miss Watson died two months earlier and freed Jim in her will, but Tom chose not to reveal Jim's freedom so he could come up with an elaborate plan to rescue Jim. Jim tells Huck that Huck's father has been dead for some time (he was the dead man they found in the floating house) and that Huck may return safely to St. Petersburg. In the final narrative, Huck declares that he is quite glad to be done writing his story, and despite Sally's plans to adopt and "sivilize" him, Huck intends to flee west to Indian Territory.Major themesTwain wrote a novel that embodies the search for freedom. He wrote during the post-Civil War period when there was an intense white reaction against blacks. According to some critics, Twain took aim squarely against racial prejudice, rising segregation, lynchings, and the generally accepted belief that blacks were sub-human. He "made it clear that Jim was good, deeply loving, human, and anxious for freedom".14 However, others have criticized the novel as racist, citing the use of the word "nigger" and Jim's Sambo-like character. Throughout the story, Huck is in moral conflict with the received values of the society in which he lives, and while he is unable to consciously refute those values even in his thoughts, he makes a moral choice based on his own valuation of Jim's friendship and human worth, a decision in direct opposition to the things he has been taught. Mark Twain in his lecture notes proposes that "a sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience", and goes on to describe the novel as ".a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat". ControversyMuch modern scholarship of Huckleberry Finn has focused on its treatment of race. Many Twain scholars have argued that the book, by humanizing Jim and exposing the fallacies of the racist assumptions of slavery, is an attack on racism.23 Others have argued that the book falls short on this score, especially in its depiction of Jim.17 According to Professor Stephen Railton of the University of Virginia, Twain was unable to fully rise above the stereotypes of black people that white readers of his era expected and enjoyed, and therefore resorted to minstrel show-style comedy to provide humor at Jim's expense, and ended up confirming rather than challenging late-19th century racist stereotypes. In one instance, the controversy caused a drastically altered interpretation of the text: In 1955, CBS tried to avoid controversial material in a televised version of the book, by deleting all mention of slavery and having a white actor play Jim Because of this controversy over whether Huckleberry Finn is racist or anti-racist, and because the word "nigger" is frequently used in the novel, many have questioned the appropriateness of teaching the book in the U.S. public school systemthis questioning of the word “nigger” best illustrated by a school administrator of Virginia in 1982 calling the novel the "most grotesque example of racism Ive ever seen in my life". According to the American Library Association, Huckleberry Finn was the fifth most frequently challenged book in the United State