THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN



Name _______________________________

McMennamy

English III – period _____

Date ________________________________

Chapters XII to XVI

Vocabulary

1. towhead – a low, tree-covered sandbar or island in a river

2. harrow-teeth – the metal spikes or teeth on a large farm implement used to break up and smooth the soil

3. crabapples – small, very sour apples

4. p’simmons – persimmons; orange, plumlike berries of the persimmon tree, edible only when very ripe

5. yonder – over there

6. chimbly-guy – one of the cables fastening a tall chimney or smokestack to the roof

7. good book – the Bible

8. texas – the cabin for steamboat officers, usually just behind or beneath the pilothouse

9. stabboard derrick – a hoisting apparatus on the right-hand (starboard) side of a ship, looking forward

10. labboard – larboard; the left-hand side (also called port) of a ship, looking forward

11. truck – assorted goods or merchandise

12. a-biling – boiling

13. aft – toward the rear of a ship

14. crawfished – retreated by scuttling backward like a crayfish, a small freshwater animal resembling a lobster

15. treed – trapped or cornered up a tree

16. halter – hangman’s noose

17. rustle – to move around vigorously; to steal, especially cattle

18. sentimentering – sentimentalizing; indulging one’s emotions

19. stern – the rear of a ship

20. careened – leaned or tilted to one side

21. jackstaff – a flagstaff on the front end of a ship

22. bitts – wood or metal posts, fastened to a ship’s deck, to which mooring lines are secured

23. spondulicks – moneyu

24. saddle-baggsed – caught or snagged so as to hang draped on either side like a pair of saddlebags

25. cretur – creature

26. beatenest – most astonishing or amazing

27. dingnation – a delicate form of “damnation”; a minced oath

28. rapscallions – lawbreakers or social outcasts

29. dolphin – Huck’s confusion of “dauphin,” the eldest son of a French king, with “dolphin,” a small, long-snouted whale

30. Jack-o’-lantern – a faint, deceptive light hovering over marshes or swamps; also called will-o’-the-wisp or ignis fatuss (fool’s fire)

31. staving – very great or remarkable

32. sweeps – long, heavy oars

33. ell – an old English measure equal to 45 inches

34. tuck – energy or spirit

35. spunk – courage

36. headline – a long rope fastened to a raft for pulling or towing it

37. looard – leeward; downwind, or in the direction toward which the wind is blowing

38. wood-yard – a place where wood for sale is stored; on the riverbank, a storage area for the wood used as fuel in steamboats

39. powwow – a noisy disturbance; a commotion

Questions

1. How do Huck and Jim keep from being seen on their trip down the river?

2. Floating on their raft one dark and stormy night, Huck spots a wrecked steamboat in the middle of the river.

a. Why does Huck want to explore the wreck?

b. How does Jim feel about Huck’s plan?

c. What do Huck and Jim discover on the wreck?

d. Why can’t Huck and Jim take to their raft to escape from the wreck?

e. Although Bill and Jake are about to leave in their skiff full of loot, they return to the wreck. Why?

f. How do Huck and Jim escape from the wreck?

g. Having found their raft again, Huck and Jim pile the loot on it. What does Huck then try to do? How successful is he?

3. Jim and Huck both understand that, as they drift down the river, they are traveling deeper into the slave states of the South each day. What plans do they make to get them out of this trouble?

4. How do Huck in the canoe and Jim on the raft lose each other one night?

5. As Jim believes he is nearing freedom, Huck’s “conscience” begins to trouble him for helping a runaway slave escape. What does Huck resolve to do?

6. Two men with guns, who are hunting runaway slaves, suddenly appear in a skiff.

a. What does Huck do?

b. How does Huck explain his failure to tell on Jim?

c. How does Huck console himself for his failure to turn Jim in?

7. Huck and Jim search for the town of Cairo in vain.

a. How are their plans to find Cairo frustrated?

b. What evidence do Huck and Jim have that they passed Cairo?

c. What new plan do they make?

d. Why are they unable to carry out this plan?

8. To what do Huck and Jim attribute all their bad luck?

9. What final stroke of bad luck overtakes Huck and Jim on their raft at night? What happens to Huck?

10. Before boarding the wrecked steamboat, Huck tells Jim that this is just the kind of adventure that Tom Sawyer would enjoy. “I wish Tom Sawyer was here,” Huck says. Once again, Mark Twain invites you to compare Tom’s boyish games of robbery and murder with reality in the world of adults.

a. You learn that the wrecked steamboat is named the Walter Scott. Why might this allusion to Sir Walter Scott remind you of Tom Sawyer?

b. Compare the way Tom Sawyer treated little Tommy Barnes for threatening to tell all the secrets of the gang with the way Bill and Jake deal with Jim Turner for the same offense.

11. Having escaped form the wreck, Huck feels compassion for the three robbers left behind.

a. Huck tells the ferryboat captain an elaborate and dramatic lie to induce him to rescue the three men on the wreck. What item does Huck pick up from the captain’s comments and weave into his lie? How does the trick work?

b. What evidence can you find that Huck is not sentimental about the gang’s plight?

12. Huck tries to make a game out of the incident in which Him and he are separated and lost in the fog.

a. When Jim wakes up and sees Huck back on the raft, how does he act? What does he call Huck?

b. What trick does Huck play on Jim?

c. Mark Twain depicts Jim as so easily fooled by Huck’s trick that he seems unable to tell reality from a dream. Do you feel that in this episode Mark Twain makes Jim behave as if he were a simpleminded child instead of a mature adult?

d. Jim suddenly calls Huck “boss.” What significance do you see in Jim’s use of this word?

e. When Jim realizes that he has been tricked with a lie, how does he respond?

f. After Jim’s response, what does Huck do? What do you think he has learned from this incident?

13. To keep the two slave-hunters from catching Jim, Huck tells more lies.

a. What is the first lie that Huck tells them?

b. What other lie keeps the men from searching the raft?

c. After the men depart, how does Jim feel about Huck’s lie? What does he call Huck?

14. Early in their journey down the river, Jim and Huck confront a moral problem – stealing food. What amusing solution to the problem do they find?

15. In the talk about King Solomon, another moral issue is raised. It seems to Huck that Jim has simply missed the point of the story of King Solomon and the child. But Jim is really concerned with a more basic point. What do you think Jim is trying to tell Huck about parents and children in his tirade against King Solomon?

16. Huck uses logic to prove to Jim that it is “natural and right” for a Frenchman to talk a different language. When Jim hoists Huck on his own logic, how does Huck avoid admitting to himself that Jim has beaten him in the argument?

17. Reread the passage in which Huck wrestles with his “conscience” over the moral issue of helping Jim to escape (possibly within pages 70-80 or so, in several instances).

a. What is the voice of Huck’s “conscience”?

b. How does Huck feel about what Jim says he will do when he becomes free?

c. Comment on the unconscious irony in the following statement by Huck:

“Here was this nigger, which I had as good as helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children – children that belonged to a man I didn’t even know; a man that hadn’t ever done me no harm.”

d. When Huck paddles off to tell on Jim, what does Jim say that makes Huck unable to betray his friend?

e. After tricking the two slave-hunters into going away, Huck returns to the raft, “feeling bad and low, because I knowed very well I had done wrong…” What irony do you see in Huck’s attitude?

18. As you follow Huck and Jim on their journey down the river, you may begin to realize the river itself is a richly complex symbol.

a. How does the river serve as a natural force that helps Huck and Jim?

b. The river is also a source of dangers. Mention several of these dangers that you have seen in Chapters 12-16.

c. All over the world, great rivers have nourished mankind in body and spirit – the sacred Ganges River of India, the life-giving Nile River of Egypt, etc. With this in mind, what aspect of nature do you think the Mississippi River symbolizes in the novel?

Chapters XVII to XVIII

Vocabulary

1. roundabout – a short outer jacket worn by boys in the nineteenth century

2. cob pipes – tobacco pipes with bowls made of hollowed pieces of corncob

3. deck passage – traveling the cheapest way, without cabin accommodations, on the deck of a steamboat

4. no slouch – considerable; worthy of respect or admiration

5. tuckered out – tired out

6. split-bottom chairs – chairs having seats made of woven strips of wood

7. mudcat – a large catfish

8. liberty-pole – a flagstaff standing alone

9. row – a noisy fight or disturbance

10. right smart chance – quite a lot; many

11. bowie – a sturdy, single-edged hunting knife

12. preforeordestination – Huck’s verbal sandwich of two theological terms; foreordination and predestination, both of which mean “being determined or decided in advance by God”

13. puncheon floor – a floor made of the smoothed faces of split logs

14. coarse-hand – writing in simple, printed letters, as opposed to script

15. water-moccasins – poisonous water-dwelling snakes native to the South

16. vittles – victuals; supplies of food

17. flinders – fragments or splinters

18. come it – manage; succeed

19. had the bulge on – had the advantage over

20. corn-dodgers – cakes made of ground Indian corn and baked

21. hard in the ashes of a fire

Questions

1. When Huck first meets the Grangerfords, what details suggest that the family is living in a state of siege?

2. What are your first impressions of Buck Grangerford?

3. How does Buck seem to feel about his unexpected visitor?

4. Who was Emmeline Grangerford? What is Huck’s attitude toward her?

5. According to Huck, what kind of man is Colonel Grangerford?

6. How does Huck regard the entire Grangerford family?

7. Who are the Shepherdsons? Why do the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords not get along?

8. One of the Grangerford slaves leads Huck to where someone is hiding in the swamp.

a. Whom does Huck find there?

b. What else does Huck discover hidden there?

9. Huck assumes that Harney Shepherdson rode off to get his hat rather than shoot back at Buck Grangerford. What do you think is the real reason that Harney spared Buck’s life?

10. Why does the feud suddenly flare up into savage fighting?

11. How has Huck been innocently involved in the cause of the present fighting?

12. Of all the deaths in the feud, which one distresses Huck most? Why?

13. How do Huck and Jim feel about being back on the raft and out in the middle of the Mississippi again?

14. When Huck, disguised as a girl, visited Mrs. Judith Loftus in St. Petersburg (Chapter 11), he was supposedly dead. Since he was also concealing a runaway slave, Huck had good reason to lie about his name. With the Grangerfords, however, Huck is among strangers, far from home and no longer with Him. Why do you think he tells them that his name is George Jackson?

15. With the Grangerfords gathered around him, Huck launches into another one of his autobiographical lies.

a. What is the dominant theme of Huck’s story?

b. Why do you suppose Huck tells this kind of story? In what ways does his lie express the truth about himself?

c. How do the Grangerfords respond to Huck’s story?

16. As when he visited Mrs. Judith Loftus, Huck once again forgets the name he made up for himself.

a. What device does he use to trick Buck Grangerford into telling him his assumed name?

b. How does Huck’s trick backfire, even though he does not realize that it has?

17. The subject of all Emmeline Grangerford’s pictures and poetry is death. How would you describe her treatment of her favorite subject?

18. Although the Grangerfords seem to Huck to be admirable people in many ways, he soon learns that beneath their surface charm they are bloodthirsty, cruel, and violent. They all participate in a senseless and deadly game called a feud. Indeed, they treat the feud as if it were a harmless game; they do not even regard the resulting deaths seriously. What evidence of this casual attitude toward death can you find?

19. In one morning, five of the Grangerfords and two or three of the Shepherdsons are shot to death. How does Huck feel about the killings he witnesses?

20. You may read newspaper accounts about battles in which certain numbers of “the enemy” were slain. Do you think that such a treatment of death resembles the Grangerfords’ treatment of death? How?

21. In Chapter 17, Huck indirectly reveals his age. About how old is he? How do you know?

22. Huck’s account of the Grangerford household is Chapter 17 is richly ironic. Reread his description of the house and its furnishings around page 90 or so.

a. What is Huck’s opinion of the Grangerford home?

b. Although Huck is a careful observer and an honest reporter, his judgment of the Grangerford household is naïve. As you read his description more carefully, certain details lead you to disagree with his high opinion of the furnishings. Because Huck’s words produce an effect that is the opposite of what he intends, the result is unconscious irony. What is the ironic effect of each of the following details?

1) The performance of the pendulum clock on the mantel-piece.

2) The appearance of the artificial fruit.

3) The “beautiful” oilcloth that covers the table.

4) The arrangement of the books on the table.

5) The kinds of pictures on the walls.

6) Huck’s description of the piano.

23. The account of Emmeline Grangerford is both ironic and hilarious. Huck’s language contributes a great deal to the humor in his description of Emmeline’s lugubrious pictures.

a. Comment on the effect of each of the following similes:

1) “A slim black dress… with bulges like a cabbage in the middle of the sleeves.”

2) “Very wee black slippers, like a chisel.”

3) “Her hair all combed up straight to the top of her head, and knotted there in front of a comb like a chair-back.”

b. What is the overall effect of Huck’s similes on your attitude toward Emmeline’s pictures?

24. Huck thinks that Emmeline’s “Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec’d” is “very good poetry.” As you undoubtedly realize, the poem is really a parody, an imitation that makes fun of a particular kind of writing. In this case, Mark Twain is satirizing sentimental, amateurish, bad poetry. As a poem, Emmeline’s ode is an atrocity; as a parody, however, it is a minor masterpiece.

a. The abbreviation Dec’d in the title stands for deceased. Why is this a comical word in the context of the title?

b. What elements in the poem itself seem comically unromantic?

25. On Sunday the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons all go to church. What is ironic about the topic of the sermon?

26. In the beginning of Chapter 18, Mark Twain stresses the attractive qualities of the Grangerfords: their elegant clothing, their personal beauty, and their impeccably good manners. How do these qualities make their involvement in the feud all the more ironic?

Chapter XIX to XXIII

Vocabulary

1. gars – long, think freshwater fish with tough, inedible flesh

2. galoot – an awkward fellow; an uncouth, disreputable man

3. chute – a narrow channel in which water flows rapidly

4. galluses – suspenders

5. carpet-bags – traveling bags made of carpet

6. temperance revival – a religious meeting in which people are exhorted to give up drinking

7. tar and feather – to punish a person by covering him with a coat of hot tar and chicken feathers

8. ride out of town on a rail – to expel a person form town by carrying him straddled on or suspended from a wooden rail

9. jour printer – a journeyman printer, that is, one who has completed his apprenticeship and learned the printing tarde

10. patent medicines – medicines whose composition is protected by patent or by secrecy; proprietary drugs

11. mesmerism – a form of hypnotism

12. phrenology – the study of the shape of a person’s skill as a way of “reading” his character and intelligence

13. layin’ on o’ hands – curing illness through faith simply by touching the ill person

14. Bilgewater – the king’s sarcastic distortion of “Bridgewater.” Bilge water is the usually foul water that collects in the bilge, or bottom of he hull, of a ship

15. nation – extremely or very (probably a humorous abbreviation of damnation)

16. cipher out – figure out; work out

17. tick – a cloth mattress cover

18. sockdolager – something unusual or extraordinary

19. jakes – rude, unsophisticated countrymen

20. linsey-woolsey – a strong, coarse fabric used for clothing

21. gingham – a plain woven cotton fabric used for clothing

22. tow-linen – a crude cloth woven from fibers of tow

23. lining out a hymn – singing or calling out the words of a hymn, a line or two at a time, for the people to follow; this was done because at a camp-meeting only the preacher usually had a hymn book, and many of the people there could not read anyway

24. Capet – the duke’s mispronunciation of Capulet, the family name of Juliet in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Capet was the family name of kings of France in the tenth to the fourteenth centuries.

25. rair up – rare up; to rise upright

26. shackly – weak and shaky

27. David Garrick – English actor (1717-1779), famous for his Shakespearean roles; there was no “younger” David Garrick

28. Edmund Kean – English actor (1787-1833), also famous as an interpreter of Shakespearean roles

29. jimpson-weeds – jimsonweed; tall, coarse, poisonous weeds with large white or violet flowers

30. a chaw – a chew; a bite

31. blackguarding – using foul or abusive language against a person

32. skaddle – skedaddle; to run away

33. mamsey – malmsey; a rich sweet wine

34. hanker – to desire strongly

Questions

1. Under what circumstances does Huck first meet the duke and the king?

2. The duke and the king are graphically portrayed individuals

a. What are your first impressions of the duke and the king? What kind f men are they?

b. The duke and the king are the only major characters in the novel whose real names we never learn. Why is the fact that they never reveal their true identities appropriate to the kind of men they are?

c. The duke and the king remind Huck of pap; he even refers to them as “his kind of people.” What traits do pap and the duke and the king have in common?

3. What new venture does the duke persuade the king to try?

4. How does the king swindle the people at the camp-meeting in the little country town of Pokeville?

5. The duke promises to figure out a way to enable them to run the raft down the river in daytime without the risk of losing Jim.

a. What stratagem does the duke devise to permit them to travel with Jim by day?

b. By having Jim submit passively to the duke’s stratagem, does Mark Twain make Jim seem unbelievably docile and foolish? Explain your point of view.

c. Why do the duke and the king need to be able to travel by day?

6. In a “little one-horse town” in Arkansas, Huck witnesses a murder and an attempted lynching.

a. What is your impression of Boggs? Was he a dangerous man?

b. What kind of man is Colonel Sherburn? Does he remind you of any other character you have already met in the novel? If so, why?

c. Why does Colonel Sherburn shoot Boggs?

d. Do you feel sympathy for Boggs? If so, why?

e. Why does the “lynching bee” fail?

7. The Shakespearean revival by the duke and the king in the little Arkansas town is an utter failure. Angered by this lack of appreciation, the duke resolves to put on a different kind of show – the Royal Nonesuch.

a. What line in his handbill does the duke feel will surely draw in customers?

b. Of what does the entire performance of the Royal Nonesuch consist?

c. When the duke lowers the curtain, how does the audience react?

d. What does the judge persuade his fellow townsmen to do? Why?

e. On the second night, the Royal Nonesuch plays to a packed house. What happens on the third night?

8. On the raft during the night, what does Jim do for Huck?

9. At daybreak, Huck observes that Jim is moaning and mourning to himself.

a. Why is Jim mourning?

b. Why doesn’t Jim’s love for his family seem natural to Huck?

c. What does Jim tell Huck about his little four-year-old daughter ‘Lizabeth?

d. What do you think Huck is beginning to learn about Jim?

10. The discussion between Huck and Jim in Chapter 14 “about kings and dukes and earls and such” and about poor little “dolphin” foreshadowed the appearance of the duke and the king. In Chapter 19, Huck and Jim discover that they have visiting “royalty” on board the raft.

a. Why does the duke tell them that he is the rightful duke of Bridgewater?

b. Why does the king later pretend that he is “the pore disappeared Dauphin, Looy the Seventeen, son of Looy the Sixteen and Marry Antonette”?

c. Is Huck deceived by the lies of the two men?

11. When the duke and the king question Huck about himself and Jim, he responds with another one of his autobiographical lies.

a. What familiar elements do you recognize in Huck’s lie?

b. Review the six autobiographical lies Huck has told so far in the story. Note that Huck often invents a whole family for himself, complete with brothers and sisters and uncles. What inner truth about Huck dose this aspect of his lies suggest?

12. In Chapter 20, Huck describes a large crowd of country people at a revivalist camp-meeting outside the little town of Pokeville.

a. What is the effect of the preacher’s sermon on the crowd?

b. What is the effect on the crowd of the king’s lie about being a converted pirate?

c. Like the new judge in Huck’s home town, the crowd at the camp-meeting is sentimental. Compare the way the judge treated pap with the way the crowd treats the king.

13. In Chapters 21 and 22, Huck describes a small town in Arkansas and its inhabitants.

a. What is your impression of the town?

b. What are the chief vices of the town loafers?

c. Toward noon, a crowd of country folk on horseback and in wagons gathers in the town. What is the mood of this crowd?

d. How does the crowd regard Bogg’s death?

e. When the drunken man at the circus becomes angry at being teased, his behavior stirs up the crowd. What do the men in the audience begin to do?

f. How does the crowd react to the seeming period of the drunken man on the runaway horse?

g. What is Huck’s reaction to the same incident?

14. In describing the Grangerfords, Huck shows us the sentimentalism of Emmeline Grangerford’s poems and pictures and the violence of the feud. In describing the people of the two little river towns, he once again reveals sentimentalism and violence side by side.

a. What do you think Mark Twain is suggesting about the relationship between sentimentalism and violence?

b. Is Huck at all sentimental? How does he feel about violence?

15. In the description of a storm earlier in the novel, you say how skillfully Huck’s vernacular English could describe nature in violent motion. Chapter 19 opens with another description of nature, this time in a calm and tranquil mood. Reread the passage.

a. Huck’s descriptive passage is organized in terms of a period of time. What is this period of time?

b. The second half of the passage describes the river at night. How does Huck use lights to help us imagine the scene?

c. Huck says, “It’s lovely to live on a raft.” Does this passage help make such a life attractive? How?

d. The description of nature in the passage is beautiful without being prettified or sentimental. Mention one or two humorous touches that help keep the passage from becoming sentimental.

e. The passage is also saved from sentimentalism by Huck’s constant awareness of the more sordid or dangerous aspects of reality. Point out several such aspects in Huck’s description.

16. Like Emmeline Grangerford’s “Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec’d,” the duke’s mangled version of Hamlet’s soliloquy is sheer comedy. Most of the lines in this hodgepodge of a speech are from Hamlet’s soliloquy in Act III, scene I, and from Macbeth.

a. What does Huck think of the duke’s acting in his delivery of the speech?

b. What is your impression of the duke’s style of acting?

17. Huck’s perception of the circus, like his judgment of the Grangerford household, reveals his lack of sophistication.

a. What are some details about the circus that Huck reports naively? In each case, what do you understand that Huck fails to understand?

b. What does Huck fail to realize about the joke the bareback rider, disguised as a drunk, played on the ringmaster?

c. Huck praises the circus, saying that “wherever I run across it, it can have all of my custom every time.” What is amusing about Huck’s remark that the circus can have his patronage?

18. In Chapters 20 to 23, Mark Twain broadens the range of social criticism in his novel.

a. What criticism of the people at the Pokeville camp-meeting does the author imply?

b. What criticism of the people in the small town in Arkansas does the author imply?

c. Reread Colonel Sherburn’s scornful speech to the lynch mob. How does his speech broaden the criticism of the people in the town to apply to people everywhere?

d. How does Huck’s talk with Jim about kings further broaden the range of social criticism?

19. An issue of great concern to people today is the growing problem of violence in America. At least one source of this violence, historians suggest, is the American frontier, which has left us with a tradition of fierce individualism and armed violence still glorified in stories, moves, and television shows about the old West. From your reading of the story thus far, what evidence of a tradition of armed violence in the frontier society of Huck’s time can you recall?

20. If the river chiefly symbolizes the benevolent life force of nature, what does the land seem to symbolize in the story?

21. Throughout the story, Huck repeatedly leaves the peace and security of the river to risk the problems and dangers of the land. What symbolic truth about man’s relationship to nature and to human society might Huck’s movements between water and land suggest?

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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Study Questions/ Reading Guide 2

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