Huck Finn Entry 1

Jeremy Keeshin Reading Discussion Entry #1 11/26/06 Chapter I – Chapter XV

John and I had our first discussion about the first 100 pages of the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn today. We talked mainly about the initial plot and got our bearings regarding the main characters before we attempted to delve slightly into what their purpose or struggle might be. We talked about Huck Finn and his cleverness and dexterity in his plot to fool the town into thinking he was murdered. We noticed that Huckleberry’s character was rather prone to lying and was very adept at fooling his community. We saw this in the instances with the murder as well as when he fooled the lady into believing he was a different person. We talked about how Jim and Huck lived on the lam together and how they became friends, and the role each had in their friendship. We talked about Twain’s style of writing and how he used dialect to refine the background of each character. We noted that it was difficult to understand the dialogue from Jim, the runaway slave, because his manner of speaking was very different. We saw that both Huck and Jim had the commonality of being treated poorly by their community, and that brought them together: Huck’s drunken father abused him and Jim was a slave for the widow Miss Watson. We talked about Huckleberry Finn and how he and Tom Sawyer and their friends had a gang, and the comedic aspect of how they were all trying to be these things they were not that they had read about in storybooks. The discussion was extremely fruitful and I felt that we got a very strong basic layout of the novel.