Huckleberry Finn

What a delightful adventure to navigate the Mississippi with Huck Finn and Jim. Mark Twain captures the dialogue and the drawl of the south and captivates us with the escapades of the runaways. The language becomes synonymous with the flowing river moving us downstream and more deeply into the story. Twain threads both of these characters and their companion Tom Sawyer through many tight holes. They are always caught in their mischief, knotted in a web of white lies and charades . The magic of character and language are embedded in humor, but often a chuckle leads to the deeper moral question of slavery, of government, and of religion. Twain has created these characters many times over, dressing them in roles to keep their identities hidden. Both Huck and Jim, at one point, are attired as women - none too successfully. We see Huck and Tom charading as others and getting lost in their new family trees - Huck as Tom Sawyer and then Tom as Sid Sawyer. Jim also gets to play a frightening creature to scare others who might find him on the raft; at one point he is pretending to be a runaway slave, which is the truth in disguise. On their journey Huck and Jim encounter the duke and the dauphin, another pair pretending to be what they are not and eventually getting caught up in their make believe. We seem them as rapscallions, then as the royal pair, and ultimately on the stage in Shakespearean roles. There are many layers of this fiction. Twain excels at veiling the reality of his characters with other fictional roles and weaving their fortunes and misfortunes into a lively tale. In the end, we can only, like Jim, accept them all these personae as ghosts who will haunt the world of fiction for a long time to come.