Theme: the theme of slavery in the novels of m. Twain contents

Chapter One: Historical and Literary Background

1.1. Introduction
It is necessary to shed enough light on the issue of slavery in America. It has characterized its history since its discovery and is based on white superiority and black inferiority. Slavery found its way in American literature, mainly in the narratives of former slaves. However, many white novelists of the nineteenth century cared about black people‟s suffering and focused on the issue of slavery such as Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).

1.2. Slavery in America

The issue of slavery left a scar in the heart of American history. Its effects lasted even after its abolition by the Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation (1863)¹ and the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. African slavery dates back to the first European settlement and was practiced in all colonial territories of America. It started when the first African slaves were brought to the North American territory of Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. The discovery of the Americas in 1492 led to a great demand for free labor to work in plantations to increase crops production in the territory. Britain was one of the leading slave-trading powers in Europe as well as France, Holland, Portugal and Spain. This process was also called “The Triangular Trade” wherein British ships carried European manufactured goods to Africa and exchanged them for slaves, who were then taken across the Atlantic to the Americas, where they were traded for sugar, cotton, rum and other goods.
African slaves were considered to be the property of their masters and were stripped of their names and deprived of their rights and dehumanized in many ways; they did not have the right to own property, make contracts or to attend church. More than 12 million Africans were taken across the Atlantic to work in plantations in the Americas. Each year, the number of exportation was continuously on the rise;
“According to the (exaggerated) data of contemporaries, in the 1780s, when the movement for the slave abolition start to improve in Europe and America, 100,000 Africans were exported yearly” (Abramova 21).
Some of these slaves found some tricks to avoid working. Some of them ate dirt to make themselves ill and unable to work and the most common way of resistance was running away from slavery. On the uncultivated land, runaways were easily caught whereas in the more mountainous and less populated lands, it was possible for slaves to run away without detection and they could live into small groups. These groups were known as maroons, while women found some ways to kill their unborn babies to prevent them from being born into slavery (“Slavery: Cause and Catalyst of the Civil War” 13).
Slavery was accepted in America with no doubts and it was believed that it is something blessed given by God. White men were convinced that black people are inferior and slavery was good for them. To illustrate this idea for example the social theorist George Fitzhugh states in his essay “The Universal History of Slavery”: “the Negro is but a grown-up child, and must be governed as a child, not as a lunatic or criminal. The master occupies toward him the place of parent or guardian” (1).This means that blacks cannot survive in a free society and the institution of slavery is there to protect them from extermination.
The issue of slavery played a key role in pushing America towards a bloody war fought between brothers wearing opposite uniforms known as the Civil War. During the years leading to the Missouri compromise, tensions began to rise between proslavery and antislavery groups within the U.S. Congress and throughout the country (“The Missouri Compromise”, History.com Staff).
In 1819, the country contained eleven free and eleven slave states that construct a balance in the U.S Senate and adding Missouri as a slave state threatened this balance in favour of slave holders. Henry Clay, a representative from Kentucky and a congress man played an essential role in giving a two-part solution known as The Missouri Compromise. The Compromise was divided into two parts, the first one aims at giving Missouri the right to be slave state and the second was the admission of Maine as a free state to keep the peace and balance between free and slave states. In addition to this, the Compromise also drew an imaginary line across the former Louisiana territory in order to separate between free and slave states (“The Missouri Compromise”, History.com Staff).
However, the aim of the Missouri compromise was to keep the union together. The compromise gave the right to slaveholders to reclaim their runaway slaves from neighboring Free States. In 1819, the issue of slavery vividly brought the attention of white people. The first signals of the civil war were seen in the conflicts that led to the Missouri Compromise of 1820s. Many scholars thought that without this Compromise the civil war would have occurred sooner than it did (“The Missouri Compromise”, History.com Staff).
The invention of the cotton gin² in 1793 solidified the importance of slavery in the South. It consequently led to a greater production of cotton. This doubled cotton production led to an unprecedented demand of both more free labour and more plantation spaces. From the southern side, there was the plantations‟ expansion westwards coupled with the higher rates of slavery to keep pace with the cotton gin. However, from the northern opposing side, the abolitionist movement was in its highest peak because the northerners were threatened by the growing economic powers of the opponent south. This clash of interests, in turn, sharpened the tension and pushed the country toward a bloody Civil War (Wade 7).
In Summer 1830, a black religious man named Nat Turner led one of the bloodiest rebellion in Southampton, Virginia. The revolt caused an immense fear in the south where he killed about fifty-five white men, women and children. They were caught when they ran out of ammunition. Nat Turner and many others were hanged. This rebellion pushed the southerners to reinforce the system of security in the south (Zinn 180).
After thirty years of the Missouri compromise, tensions started to rise again between the north and the south due to the division of slavery in the new gained territories in the Mexican American war (1846-1848). Therefore, there was another compromise which aimed at keeping the union together. It was named the compromise of 1850 and consisted of laws admitting California as a free state while Utah and New Mexico were given the right to choose whether to be free or slave territories under popular sovereignty. The compromise also banned the slave trade in Washington D.C. and passed a fugitive slave act that gave the right to capture fugitive slaves (“Compromise of 1850”. History.com staff).
The most controversial part of the 1850 compromise was the Fugitive Slave Act that made it easier for southerners to recapture their runaway slaves within the American territory. Moreover, the government imposed penalties on those who aid black slaves to escape towards neighboring free lands such as Canada. More than
20.000 blacks run away during the next ten years (“Fugitive Slave Acts”, History.com Staff).
When the American government could not find any solutions for the issue of slavery and each new law and decision seemed to make things worse, these decisions made the south and the north in troubles for the ending of slavery. The south remained agrarian while the north became more industrialized. Different political and social beliefs appeared and developed between the two territories. All these issues led to huge disagreements in terms of taxes and tariffs paid on imported goods to the south. Many southerners felt that those tariffs were unfit because they imported a wider variety of goods than northerners. Many taxes were also imposed on many southern goods that were sent to foreign countries (“Slavery: Cause and Catalyst of the Civil War” 8).
In fact, this was not the major cause that drove the American nation to the bloody Civil War, but the issue of slavery and its future was the main cause that led to the disturbance of the union because southerners aimed to preserve slavery as well as to establish southern independence as a new confederation under its own constitution whereas the northern and western states fought to preserve the union
(“Slavery: Cause and Catalyst of the Civil War” 5).
Many battles were fought when Civil War was sparkled between the Confederate and the Union army. The “First Bull Run” is the first major engagement of the Civil War. Confederates routed the north. Northern civilians who rode out to see the battle had to flee back to Washington with panicked union troops. The total casualty alerted both North and south that the war would not be won easily (“First Battle of Bull Run”, History.com staff).
These battles and others led to great loss in term of lives from both sides the confederate and the union army and this fact made the American Civil War known as the deadliest war in the American history, with a total death of 620.000 men from combat and diseases (“Civil War Casualties” Hisory.net.).
The president Abraham Lincoln privately detested slavery. In the Emancipation Proclamation he denounced that these three million slaves in the American territory should gain their freedom as a step to strengthen the Union forces in the Civil War, and to weaken the Confederacy by depriving it from a portion of its major labor (The emancipation Proclamation Goes Into Effects).
The emancipation proclamation was issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863 when the American nation approached the third year of the bloody civil war declaring that “All persons held as slaves within any state or designated part of a state the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” (Lincoln 1).
The emancipation aimed at freeing all slaves in the rebellious states of the south, but it was limited in many ways because it was applied only to states that had seceded from the union, while slavery was kept in the loyal border states. Then some parts of the confederacy that had come under the Northern control were explicitly excused from the Emancipation Proclamation, and the most important part of this emancipation Proclamation is that it made the war for the Union a War for freedom. It added a moral strength to the Union on both sides, military and political, because the freedom of slaves depended on the Union‟s military victory in the war. It also gave black people the right to engage in the Union army and Navy.
As a result, and by the end of the war, about 200,000 black soldiers and sailors had fought for the Union and freedom (“The Emancipation Proclamation”, National Archives). The suffering of black slaves and the mistreatments of white people not only from the civil War but from the day they were brought to the American territory were mentioned in many works of American white novelists and slave narratives.

1.3. Slavery in American Literature

Slavery has been a major concept in the American society since its very first times in the United States. But it was not a theme in literature until literary Realism was in its zenith. Realist writers aimed at treating the material of slavery in a realistic fashion. The literatures tackling slavery consist of a sympathetic description of the enslaved and the brutality they endure. Slave narratives, however, were much more insightful when it comes to slavery as a theme.
The topic of slavery in literature, in most of the cases, is found in the writings of literate slaves or former slaves. Non-slave blacks of the Free Sates and white writers who were filled with abolitionist qualities as well made of slavery a major theme in their works. These works address vehemently or sometimes diplomatically the injustices towards slaves by their owners specifically and the white supremacist society generally (Andrews).

1.3.1 Slave Narratives

The period between the mid-eighteenth until the late-nineteenth century witnessed a birth and then rise of a new genre. This genre was innovative because it is a production of the African slave community, namely, “slave narratives”. It was the first black literary non-fiction prose. The narratives, as apparent from the term per se, feature the hardships of the African-Americans under slavery, but not after freedom. It might seem quite ironic that African slaves can write. Slave narratives are written by either the slaves themselves, or dictated to literate persons. The clearest examples of slave narratives in America are Olaudah Equiano‟s Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, Frederick Douglass‟s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and most significantly Harriet Jacobs‟ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In these works, one cannot argue that there is any theme as central as that of slavery; the three authors placed an emphatic stress on the issue of slavery.
Olaudah Equiano was the first African-American to write a slave narrative in 1789, titled Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. In this slave narrative, Equiano takes slavery as his motif and theme. He describes with details his life from boyhood in West Africa until his capture there, then the journey through the dreadful transatlantic Middle Passage, to his eventual freedom and economic success in Britain (Greaver).
Equiano, as a black African who endured slavery, argues that slavery is indeed far worse than death as he describes how the blacks who were held captives against their will decide to commit suicide so that they do not get into slavery. He also describes the white men‟s captivity of blacks as a flagrant denial to human rights with no clear plausible justification (Vanspanckeren 13).
Like all the rest of slaves Equiano has been through beating and whipping in various stations including Africa, in the slave transporting ships and finally in the plantation where he has been working. He described the whipping and the beating as mutilating physically as well as spiritually as he was gradually losing his sense of self (Greaver).
Though the main explicit reason behind the writing of his narrative was a clear and daring protest against the International Slave Trade, yet he has passed by some touching facts about white masters as he was describing the relationship with his master Michael Henry Pascal, that he thought was profound and intimate, until his master sold him with no second though as he were a mere property to another white man (Baena).
Frederick Douglass was born on a Maryland plantation where he was brought and exposed to the hardest conditions of slavery. In his very first years of youth, he was displaced out to the relatively liberal Baltimore household where, fortunately, he learned reading and writing. At 21 years of age, he escaped to Massachusetts in 1838. Helped by the abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass made spread of anti-slavery ideals through lectures (Vanspanckeren46).
In 1845, Douglass published his best and most popular amongst many slave narratives: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, what is commonly best known as Douglass‟s Narrative. It was popular like no other slave narrative was just few years after its publication (Vanspanckeren45). In his Narrative, Douglass made use of slavery as a central theme. He studied its impacts on both the lives of slaves and the slaveholders as he states that it destroys the individual personalities (Essays.ws Editors), reinforcing his viewpoint with many cases he witnessed or heard of besides his own sorrowful experiences.
On the other hand, Harriet Ann Jacobs was the first woman to write a slave narrative. She was born a slave in Edenton, North Carolina, in 1813. After her mother's death, Jacobs was sent to live with her mother's mistress, Margaret Horniblow, where she was taught to sew, read and write. After years of slavery there, she escaped and then was freed. Jacobs became an abolitionist major reformer after her single most influential slave narrative's publication; Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl that was inspired from her own life after being enslaved and abused in another white man's property (Harriet Ann Jacobs Biography.com).
In her book-length narrative, Jacobs chronicles her experiences and the horrors of slavery and how slave women are treated just a little more than objects. Unlike Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass who suffered from physical brutality and deprivation, she tackles slavery from a female angle as she talks with details about the sexual harassment by the masters and its psychological effects, in addition to the pressure of her masters‟ wife and oppression. The significance of her narrative resulted from the fact that she dealt with slavery from a very sensitive and crucial side. She focused on the African-American women‟ mental and spiritual anguish as more devastating than slavery's physical abuse.
Harriet Jacobs gained the heavy title among the American historiographical canon due to the inter-disciplinary attribute of her narrative. In the narrative, she describes not only her endurance but also those of the white free women in the freestates to add a feminist touch to her work.
All of Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs were educated black slaves who dealt with slavery as the major problem. However, slavery was dealt with by whites as inhumanity, but in form of novels not in form of non-fiction narratives.

1.3.2. White Novelists

Slavery was also found in the writings of some white abolitionist novelists. Due to her most popular fictitious novel; Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly, Harriet Beecher Stowe won the epithet of the first abolitionist writer. She was sharply criticized by pro-slave community. The book per se was written as a direct response to the Fugitive Slave Act to urge sympathy and feelings for slaves who endured all sorts of inhuman treatment.
Harriet Beecher Stowe took slavery from very sensitive levels; political, religious and social. Politically speaking, she described slavery as a contradiction in the United States of America as she described it as the nation that purportedly embodied democracy and equality for all men (Vanspanckeren44). Yet its dominant whites practiced slavery and abused the blacks who served them. Second, Stowe herself was surrounded with religious members including her father, brother and later her husband who were well-educated Protestant clergymen and effective reformers. She herself was a ne plus ultra of old New England Puritan stock (Vanspanckeren44). Based on her thorough religious grounds, Harriet Beecher Stowe severely attacks slavery and she states that it is a non-Christian practice and that the society whose fathers are Puritans should make an end to slavery at once.
Last but not least, Harriet Beecher Stowe highlights another aspect that is probably the main reason behind the rise of the abolitionist movement. She gives insights of some real-life slave experiences. Harriet Beecher Stowe had the guts to portray what whites do to the slave families, deeds such as selling members; usually fathers, that leads to the division of families and therefore destroys normal parental love. She described these deeds as crimes against the sanctity of domestic love that is indeed God‟s gift amongst humans (Vanspanckeren44).
Due to her humane goals, Harriet Beecher Stowe was successful in portraying and making a remarkable spread of anti-slavery mind-sets and the abolitionist cause amongst the pro-slavery American communities. Her novel was given a considerable rank among the anti-slavery canon. Another famous American novelist who dealt with slavery in his writings is Mark Twain. He dealt with slavery in many of his works and he defended the right of slaves to gain their freedom.

1.4. Mark Twain’s Biography and Works

Mark Twain is the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens who was born in the Hamlet of Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835, the sixth child of John and Jane Clemens. He spent his childhood in Hannibal which served as a model to many towns in his books. It is a must to be aware about Mark Twain‟s family, hometown, opinions and his life because all these aspects had an immense influence on his literary work.
When he was four years old, Sam and his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a town on the bank of the Mississippi river. His father John Marshall Clemens worked in a general store (Sweets 01). Twain spent his young life in a prosperous family that owned a number of household slaves, yet the death of Clemens‟s father left the family in financial troubles.
Twain left school at the age of 12 after his father‟s death, and he became a printer apprentice at the Hannibal Courier. In 1851 he got a job in his brother Orion‟s journal Hannibal Western Union. This foreshadowed his future job as he became in touch with all the events that happened in the town, and it provided him with experiences and materials for his writings. Then in 1857 he began learning the art of piloting a steamboat on the Mississippi. Mark Twain worked as a river boat pilot. He loved his job; it was exciting, and well paying. However by the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 he lost his job because traffic on the Mississippi river was shut off. Life on the river can be seen throughout many works such as the scenes of Huckleberry Finn (“Mark Twain” Biography.com).
As soon as the Civil War began, the traffic along the Mississippi river stopped. First, Twain joined the confederate militia in 1861 due to his southern heritage but after two weeks only, he found out that it is foolish to die for nothing and deserted the army. He went west and worked as a gold miner, a profession at which he failed miserably. Mark Twain said:
I was a soldier two weeks once in the beginning of the war, and was hunted like a rat the whole time. Familiar? My splendid Kipling himself hasn't a more burn't in, hard-baked and unforgettable familiarity with that death-on-the pale-horse-with-hell-following-after which a raw soldier's first fortnight in the field--and which, without any doubt, is the most tremendous fortnight and the vividest he is ever going to see (Lombardi).
In February 1870 and at the age of 24 Mark Twain got married to Olivia (Livy) Langdon, the daughter of an abolitionist family in Elmira, New York. Olivia Clemens was considered to be frail in health; she played an essential role in the popularity of his collective works due to her moral influence and literary experience. The couple settled in Buffalo and later had four children. After many years of his marriage the family went through a couple of slight incidents that disturbed their bliss and brought them to a pessimistic mood. At first, they lost their toddler son Langdon, to diphtheria; in 1896 they lost their favourite daughter, Susy, at the age of 24, of spinal meningitis then his youngest daughter, Jean, died in 1909 at the age of 29 of a heart attack and in 1904 his wife Livy died after a long illness.
This immense loss made him live in hell till his death on April 21, 1910 at the age of 74 in Connecticut. He was buried in Elmira, New York (“Mark twain” Biography.com).
During the late 1860‟s and the 1870‟s Mark Twain‟s writing, characterised by using different and various vernacular and dialect, gave him an immense celebrity. His novel The Innocents Abroad (1869) was an instant best seller and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) received even greater national acclaim and covered Twain‟s position as a giant in American literary domain as the American nation grew and prospered economically in the post Civil War period. An era that was known as the Gilded Age because the United States witnessed prosperity and development in all aspects economically, politically and even in the field of literature. His works were well known and sold in all parts of America; this made him wealthy enough to build a large house in Hartford, Connecticut (“Mark twain” Sparknotes).
Mark Twain began working on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a sequel to Tom Sawyer, in an effort to take advantage of the popularity of his earlier novel. This new novel took on more serious character, however, as Mark Twain focused progressively on the issue of slavery and the south. This pushed him to put it aside, perhaps because of its darker tone that did not fit the optimistic sentiment of the Gilded Age. Ernest Hemingway stated that: “all of American literature comes from one great book, Twain‟s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (Vanspanckeren 48). Thus, many writers considered Mark Twain as the father of American literature.

1.5. Conclusion

The hardships, the inhumanity, oppression, distress, racism and slavery were excellent motivations behind the birth of the slave narratives by black educated former slaves. The rising tensions between the anti-slavery north and the proslavery south that have been taking place in the years prior to the Civil War provided realist novelists with unprecedented materials for the white abolitionist writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain to write about. They paved the way for the following generation of novelist to make a space for the theme of slavery a relevant theme in literature. Twain remains the best example of those who deal with the issue of slavery in their writings.

CHAPTER TWO SLAVERY IN THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN

2.1. Introduction

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel that speaks about an important period in the American history. Mark Twain in his novel focuses on the ignorance of southern society and southern people in their support to slavery. He uses characters to embody real issues that blacks suffered from. Mark Twain as one of the great American novelists of the nineteenth century gives us a glimpse on life in the 1840s‟ in America.

2.2. Synopsis

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a satirical novel. The novel starts when Tom Sawyer and Huck have each come into a considerable amount of money as a result of their earlier adventures (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer). Both novels are set in the town of St. Petersburg, Missouri which lies on the Mississippi river. At the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Huckleberry Finn a very poor boy and Tom Sawyer a middle-class boy with a big imagination that he used for his own good, found a bag of gold that belongs to some robbers. As a result, Huck gained a big amount of money which the bank held for him (Spark notes. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn).
Huck, a young boy about thirteen years old, has been placed under the guardianship of the Widow Douglas, who, together with her sister, Miss Watson, is trying to civilize him with proper dress, manners and religious piety. Huck appreciates their effort but he found civilized life as imprisoning, confining and false and he would rather live free and wild.
The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways (Twain 02).
But Huck could not stay in that house; with the help of Tom Sawyer he could run away one night past Miss Watson‟s slave Jim, to meet up with his band members. They both played tricks on the slaveJim, the first trick is when Tom suggests to attach Jim to a tree after he sleeps just for fun, as if Twain is trying to show us how black slaves suffered from white mistreatment and how they were not considered to be human but only as objects or tools to have fun “When we was ten foot off Tom whispered to me, and wanted to tie Jim to the tree for fun” (Twain 6). Also they make another trick on Jim when Tom and Huck climb into the house and steal three candles for which Tom laid five cents on the table for pay. Then Tom quietly makes his way to Jim, takes off Jim‟s hat and places it on a limb above
Jim‟s head. After Jim wakes up he believes he has been bewitched. According to Huck Jim tells all the other slaves that he had been ridden around the state by some witches, and hung his hat on a limb to show who done it: “Jim said the witches bewitched him and put him in a trance, and rode him all over the State, and then set him under the trees again” (Twain 6).
Huck‟s life changed after the sudden reappearance of his lazy, drunken, abusive father “pap” in the story. His father was looking for the six thousand dollars, when he appears in the town he starts asking for Huck‟s money. “I‟ve been in town two days, and I hain‟t heard nothing but about you bein‟ rich. I heard about it away down the river, too. That‟s why I come” (Twain 22). The local Judge, Judge Thatcher and the widow try to get legal custody yet another Judge in the town believes in the natural right of Huck‟s natural father and even tries to reform him, but pap soon returns to his bad habits, he walks around the town harassing his son. Meanwhile, Huck gives all his money to Judge Thatcher to keep it away from his father “I hain‟t got no money, I tell you. You ask Judge Thatcher; he‟ll tell you the same” (Twain 22).
Pap kidnaps him and locks him in an old cabin near the river, but Huck refuses to live in such a miserable situation, he finds out a solution. During the absence of his father he fakes his own murder and sets off down the Mississippi
River. Huck encounters Miss Watson‟s slave Jim on an island called Jackson‟s Island. Jim has run away when he knew that Miss Watson was planning to sell him down the Mississippi river “I hear old missus tell de widder she gwyne to sell me down to Orleans, but she didn‟ want to, but she could git eight hund‟d dollars for me, en it „uz sich a big stack o‟ money she couldn‟ resis‟” (Twain 45) so he ran away to Jackson‟s island and his goal is to reach the free states.
Jim was trying to get to Cairo, Illinois and then to Ohio, a free state where slavery is outlawed in an attempt to buy his family‟s freedom. The two decide to hide together. To avoid the danger of discovery they agree on floating down the river on a raft they found earlier at night and sleep during the day. At first Huck has doubts about whether to tell someone about Jim‟s running away or not, afterwards when they talked together in depth Huck starts to know many things about Jim‟s hard life. From this moment Huck‟s opinion about black people and slavery start to change.
During their journey down the river, Huck and Jim miss the Cairo bend in the fog one night and find themselves floating deeper into slave territory. Huck‟s and Jim‟s raft is crashed by a steam boat and they are separated in the mighty river. Huck swims to the shore where he meets the Grangerfords, a local prosperous slaveholding family. Huck claims to be George Jackson, a passenger who fell from a steam boat.
“I warn‟t prowling around, sir, I fell overboard off of the steamboat.” “Oh, you did, did you? Strike a light there, somebody. What did you say your name was?”
“George Jackson, sir. I‟m only a boy.” (Twain 99).
Huck becomes friend with Buck Grangerford a boy of his age and he knows from him that the Grangerfords family is engaged in a thirty year blood feud against another family, the Shepherdsons. Huck witnessed a violent eruption of the feud in which many people are killed, he finds Jim and returns to the raft.
Huckleberry Finn also tries to trick Jim when he reunites with him and he pretends that Jim dreamed up their entire separation “Oh, well, that‟s all right, because a dream does tire a body like everything sometimes. But this one was a staving dream; tell me all about it, Jim” (Twain 88). At the beginning Jim is convinced that his separation with Huck is not true and it is only a dream but later on Jim discovers that Huck tricks him when he observes all the remains, dirt and tree branches collected on the raft. “En all you wuz thinkin‟ „bout wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie” (Twain 89). He gets mad of Huck for making a fool of him after he had worried about him. But after all Huck feels bad and finally he apologizes, and he feels bad about hurting Jim.
Huck and Jim continue down the river until they meet two men calling themselves a King and a Duke who are being followed by armed bandits. They claim to be a displaced English duke (the Duke) and the long lost-heir to the French throne (the Dauphin). Powerless to tell the two adult men to leave, Huck and Jim continue down the river with the pair aristocrats. The duke and the dauphin start performing plays in many towns and went through a good deal of troubles.
Afterwards the Duke and the Dauphin pretend to be Peter Wilks‟ long lost brothers from England in an attempt from them to steal all the money left behind in his will, but they run away before they are caught. Huck gets free of them and continues searching for Jim who is sold by the king. He ends up at Tom Sawyer's Aunt Sally's house, where Tom and Huck rescue Jim “we had Jim out of the chains” (Twain 294). Then Tom reveals that Miss Watson has freed Jim before she died. Huck decides to travel west before anyone will try to “sivilize” him again.

2.3. Characters

All the characters in the novel are involved in the institution of slavery, either by being themselves slaves like Jim, or by owning slaves or making money from slavery.

2.3.1 Huck Finn

Huck is the protagonist and the narrator of the novel. From the beginnings Mark Twain makes it clear that Huck is a boy who comes from the lowest levels of white society and he therefore owns no slaves himself. In fact while we follow Huck in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn it appears that this young boy and thanks to his distance from normal society is cynical of the world around him and the ideas passed on to him particularly after he travels down the river. His experiences with Miss Watson‟s slave Jim force him to question the things society has taught him. Huck owns no slaves and this pushes him to help the slave Jim to reach his own freedom because he did not have that harsh attitude towards blacks and he discovers that blacks are humans just like white people. This is can be seen in chapter sixteen when Jim told Huck his plan to buy his family freedom “he would buy his wife, which was owned on a farm close to where Miss Watson lived; and then they would both work to buy the two children, and if their master wouldn‟t sell them, they‟d get an Ab‟litionist to go and steal them” (Twain 91-92).
Huck is a thirteen-year old boy, the son of the drunken man from St Petersburg, Missouri, a town on the bank of the Mississippi river. Huck shares his society‟s view of slaverywhich can be seen in chapter sixteen when Jim speaks about his freedom as they came near free states. Huck starts to have some doubts about guiding Jim towards his freedom“But you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a paddled ashore and told somebody” (Twain91). The idea of Jim‟s freedom starts to trouble him, and he could not accept it because of what people and society will say about him and the fact he saves a slave. That act was not accepted at that time “I begun to get it through my head that he was most free—and who was to blame for it? Why, me. I couldn‟t get that out of my conscience, no how nor no way. It got to troubling me so I couldn‟t rest; I couldn‟t stay still in one place (Twain 91). Then he tries to write a letter to Tom and tell him to tell Miss Watson where he was (Jim) but he gives up the idea for two reasons. The first one is that Miss Watson would sell Jim down the river and people will make Jim feel ungrateful for the rest of his life because he ran away from his master and the second reason is that people would say that Huck helps a nigger to get his freedom:
“Huck Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom; and if I was ever to see anybody from that town again I‟d be ready to get down and lick his boots for shame (Twain 215). In this part of the novel Twain shows us to what extent society can shape people‟s mind and actions.
Huck Finn is one of the most important characters in the novel due to his inner struggle with his conscience. It is Huck‟s vision through which readers will see other characters and events of the novel. Huck views his surroundings with a practical and logical lens, he observes the environment and gives realistic description of the Mississippi river and the culture that dominates people of the south. The Widow Douglass tries to improve and civilize him but Huck rejects her attempts and maintains his independent ways. The society fails to protect him from his abusive drunken father. Huck‟s distance from normal society makes him mocking of the world around him and the ideas it passes on to him. Huck‟s instinctual disbelieve and his experiences as he travels down the river force him to question the things society has taught him as well as he depicts a realistic view of common ignorance, slavery, and the inhumanity that follows. (Cliff Notes, Character Analysis Huckleberry Finn).
While moving down the Mississippi river and through their long journey on the raft and the hard situations that they encounter, Huck proves his natural cleverness while taking some final decisions that would upset the society. For example, when Huck and Jim meet a group of slave hunters and he tells a lie to save Jim, for him he knows that telling a lie is bad, but he does so for the sake of saving his friend Jim, in this case telling a lie is something right for him. For example the Smallpox story that he makes up for slave-hunters to protect the runaway slave Jim
“Your pap‟s got the small-pox, and you know it precious well. Why didn‟t you come out and say so? Do you want to spread it all over?” (Twain 94). As Huck realizes it seems to be a good idea to tell a lie depending on its purpose (Spark Notes, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn NP).
Huck is still a child and every situation he encounters seems to be new for him and it represents a chance to learn more about this world. According to the law, Jim is Miss Watson‟s slave or property, but according to Huck‟s sense and justice it is more appropriate for him to help Jim rather than to take him back to his old life as a slave. When Huck ran back to the raft in order to run away with Jim from the
King and the Duke, Jim is gone and Huck starts to cry because he could not save him and he discovers from the young boy that his friend Jim is sold in the Phelps plantation“Down to Silas Phelps‟ place, two mile below here. He‟s a runaway nigger, and they‟ve got him” (Twain 214).
Huck could be seen as a symbol for America, because when he talks with Jim on the raft he knows the suffering of Jim is due to civilization. As a result, in the novel, Huck is running away from civilization that caused him and his friend Jim many problems, they had problems with slave-hunters then with the con men who sold Huck‟s friend Jim. Slavery is spread in this period and as if it is something obligatory because throughout the novel one may notice that all families in the south own slaves; “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” (Twain 295). Twain is demonstrating through the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the fact that slavery in the south was accepted among people and it has nothing to do with morals and slave‟s feelings.
When Huck says “he got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest”, he is taking the role of the pioneer: heading out to discover new natural country far away from this one, as soon as Aunt Sally plans to “sivilize” him, he starts thinking of running away and as if he running away from civilization that caused black people‟s suffering and injustice. In his novel, Twain shows to what degree slaves were over exploited, oppressed and physically and mentally abused, he uses the character Jim to explain how inhumanely Jim was separated from his wife and children.