Reading in Public No. 32: Six things to know about Huck Finn before you read James
Plus frequently asked HF questions
Percival Everett’s James is coming out on March 19th and, readers, I am so excited for you to get into this book, so get your preorders in! The number one question I’ve been asked is if it’s necessary to (re)read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in order to appreciate James. Here’s the thing: I don’t really like Huck Finn. I’m never going to encourage anyone to read Huck Finn without the support of a teacher or supplementary texts. It’s a hard book for modern readers to unpack, myself included!
[Sidenote: I talk a lot more about my relationship with HF in an episode of Sarah’s Bookshelves dropping tomorrow so subscribe here!]
At the same time, an understanding of source material can always enhance a reading of a retelling. So today, I’m offering some of the things I think it is most important to understand about Huck Finn if you want to get a little more out of James. First, some disclaimers. All of this information is coming out of my brain or my teaching notes, hence the lack of citations. I APOLOGIZE!! Second, I am not a Twain expert. I barely studied Twain in college or and not at all in grad school. I had to teach myself all of this through collaboration with colleagues and exploration of annotated editions when I was assigned to teach this to my high school students. Third, I hated teaching this book. I understand its importance in the literary canon and I admire Mark Twain, but I have very little fondness for this book. That came across in my classroom and it may come across here. Fourth, and most importantly, I am not doing any analysis of James in this post. These are simply the big picture things about Huck Finn that I kept in mind while reading James. I am not taking the analytical leap to interpret what Percival Everett may or may not be commenting on with his novel.
Finally, if you want to know more about Huck Finn and its position in the canon, I highly recommend reading both Toni Morrison and Jane Smiley’s essays on the topic, and listening to our Novel Pairings discussion of the novel.
Six things to know about Huck Finn before you read James
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the story of two runaways. The novel follows two characters, Huck and Jim, rafting the Mississippi River as they escape their own uniquely bad situations at home in St. Petersburg, Missouri. Thirteen-year-old Huck fakes his own death to escape his abusive alcoholic father, Pap, who has recently returned to St. Petersburg and his guardian Miss Watson who is attempting to “civilize him.” Jim, an enslaved Black man, runs away after hearing that his owner Miss Watson intends to sell him and separate him from his family. While the two don’t set out together, they accidentally meet up while hiding on a river island and decide to voyage together. However, Huck and Jim are separated for much of the novel, which is important to James.
The novel is a coming-of-age story told entirely through Huck’s perspective. Thirteen-year-old Huck narrates the novel. He’s not necessarily an unreliable narrator—he’s earnest and honest with the reader—but his perspective is certainly limited by his age, his circumstances, and his biases. Huck has a big imagination, but he’s also not capable fully capable of understanding the world from a perspective other than his own. This means that Huck is not considering Jim’s experience of or attitude towards the situations they find themselves in. Additionally, the thematic focus of the book is Huck’s moral development, primarily in regards to his moral and ethical considerations of slavery. Throughout the book, Huck feels that he has done wrong by running away with Jim because, in his view, he has “stolen” another person’s “property.” However, he also knows Jim is a human being and he doesn’t feel right about doing anything that puts him back into bondage1. By telling the story through the eyes of a child, Twain is able to point out the moral absurdity of the institution of slavery. Yet at the same time, the text’s point of view clearly prioritizes the white perspective and leaves the sheer terror of Jim’s plight off the page. Jim, therefore, becomes more of a tool for Huck’s development than a dynamic character of his own.
It’s an episodic adventure, with some outlandish plot points. The plot follows an episodic structure with each chapter containing its own mini-adventure. Think of it like watching a sitcom. Each chapter is an episode that gets our protagonists into a tricky situation that they must resolve. While some episodes/chapters conclude neatly, others end in cliffhangers, and the novel as a whole is still telling one story and following one main narrative arc. Some of the episodes in Huck Finn feel very grounded, while others feel more outlandish. Huck and Jim meet some ridiculous characters along the way, most notably for James, the Duke and the King, two devious con artists who put Jim’s life in mortal peril.
But it’s considered one of the first novels of the American Realism literary movement. Reading Huck Finn today, “realistic” probably isn’t the first word you’d use to describe the novel, however, this book is considered a major turning point towards Realism in American literature. Realism was a reaction against Romanticism—a literary movement that emphasized imagination and emotional intensity verging on the supernatural. Where Romanticism idealizes the human spirit, Realism attempts to depict people and life as they are. A large part of the Realism of the book is the characters’ speech patterns. Unlike Romantic novels which gifted characters with impressive diction and syntactical structures, Realist novels attempted to capture the way real people spoke. Twain therefore uses vernacular2—the language, jargon, and pronunciation of a specific place or group of people—to distinguish between characters and capture “real life.” Vernacular also helps distinguish between the characters’ levels of education. Tom Sawyer speaks differently from Huck who speaks differently from Jim. What is important to remember, though, is that this is vernacular captured by a white man and written for other white readers. Authorship and audience is extremely important and ought to call our attention to the authenticity of the project.
It’s a satire. Twain wrote political satire before turning to novels and that ethos certainly makes its way into this book. A satire is a work that uses humor—especially irony and hyperbole—to criticize political or social realities. Huck Finn relies heavily on exaggeration and caricatures to ridicule slavery and those who support it, meaning the racist language of the time is dialed up to eleven in this novel. There’s a good deal of irony throughout, but perhaps most important to a reading of James is the dramatic irony we experience while reading Huck Finn—we adult readers understand much more than Huck does, and Everett’s James does too. I also want to note that while Twain’s humanizing portrayal of Jim may have been radical at the time, he also exists in the book as an object of humor. We are supposed to laugh at Jim’s superstitions and malapropisms (incorrect uses or pronunciation of words). Jim’s status as “object” in the novel—object of Huck’s moral development and object of readers’ laughter—should make us uncomfortable as a modern audience.
Even at the time of publication, the racist language made readers uncomfortable. As mentioned above, Twain exaggerates the racist language of the time and place in order to point out how despicable it is. The book uses the n-word over 200 times—it’s truly abhorrent. However, it’s important to note that the hyperbole is not about the language itself. It’s not that this isn’t how some people spoke, it’s that this isn’t how people spoke in public. Twain aired a lot of dirty laundry in this book, and that made many readers and critics uncomfortable. Cree Myles of All Ways Black talks more about this here.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Shouldn’t I just (re)read Huck Finn?
A: Of course, if you want to! Huck Finn is a very challenging read disguised as a very simple book. From our modern vantage point, it’s difficult to pick up on the satire and political allegory throughout the book. In my opinion, this is a classic best read in the context of a class. But if you want to read it, have at it! I’m sure there will be details in James that pop out for those who do take the time.
Q: If I am (re)reading Huck Finn before James, what are some key themes, scenes, or things to pay extra attention to?
A: Pay attention to language, superstitions, and names. Pay attention to point of view—how might Jim be seeing scenes differently than Huck? Pay attention to any scenes with the Duke and the Dauphin/King. Pay attention to when Jim is not on the page. Pay attention to the ending.
Q: What inspired Twain to write Huck Finn?
A: Twain’s own moral issues with the institution of slavery evolved over the course of his life, and he wrote HF in part to depict this personal evolution. He also loved the Mississippi River and worked on a river boat for a time, and his love for this place certainly shines through in the text.
Q: Is Huck Finn a kids’ book?
A: HF is marked as “10 and up” on Amazon, but please don’t read this to your 10-year-old. While the narrator is young, the themes are incredibly complex, the language is dense, and the satire must be unpacked. I’m not sure why this book still holds children’s lit status (we talk about that in our Novel Pairings episode. Go listen!), but I personally think a classroom of older teens or adults is the appropriate place for this book.
Q: What’s the deal with Tom Sawyer?
A: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a companion book to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and much more of a kids’ book. It was written and published first, and the events of TS take place prior to those of HF. Tom as a character is somewhat symbolic of a more Romantic way of being in the world. Tom, for example, also fakes his own death, but it’s for attention and a desire to feel other’s grief for him, rather than for necessity as Huck does. Because Tom is more educated than Huck, Huck looks up to him and often tries to emulate him. However, Twain himself seems to have more of a fondness for the “street smarts” of Huck than the book smarts of Tom3. [SPOILER ALERT FOR HF BUT NOT REALLY FOR JAMES BUT DON’T READ THIS IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW ANYTHING AT ALL ABOUT THE END OF JAMES] At the end of Huck Finn, Huck enlists Tom’s help to free Jim from enslavement. Tom concocts a ridiculous, over-the-top, truly awful, and rather dangerous scheme based on the Romantic adventure novels he loves. In the end, this was all an unnecessary risk because Miss Watson had already legally freed Jim—which Tom knew. The way Tom prioritizes adventure and story over Jim’s life is a commentary both on white peoples’ attitudes towards enslaved Black people and the Romantic ideals of the previous literary period.
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-Sara
The moral center of the novel comes in Chapter 31 where Huck debates whether or not he should write to Miss Watson to tell her where Jim is. It’s often called the “can’t pray a lie” chapter and is honestly a highlight of the text. You can read that chapter for free here.
You may also hear this described as dialect. Dialect and vernacular are basically the same thing—vernacular generally refers to the speech of a more specific group of people. For example, the dialect of the South versus the vernacular of educated white Southerners.
Twain himself didn’t have much of a formal education.
I enjoyed this! I’m from Hannibal, the real life town where this is set and where Mark Twain grew up, and I worked in city tourism in college, I know WAY too much about Twain. I liked your point about Twain’s “airing out of dirty laundry” of how white people talked and what they truly thought- and I want to make the point that many white people in Hannibal STILL talk like that. This novel is so timeless for me because it’s still so relevant here.
I have long loved The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Jim has always been my favorite character. And, I think he was probably Twain’s, too. His feelings are the most relatable and admirable in the book. I would like to add that we are supposed to find Huck’s speech, ignorance, and superstitions humorous as well as Jim’s. I am looking forward to reading James. From your praise, I expect to like it and that the 2 books will complement each other. Mark Twain created a lovely, important character in Jim.