Huck gives a brief summary of how he and Tom got six thousand dollars each at the end of Tom Sawyer. Judge Thatcher has taken Huck’s money and invested it with a dollar of interest coming in each day, and Huck now lives with the Widow Douglas and her sister, Miss Watson. The sisters are, as Huck puts it, trying to “sivilize” him, and his frustration at living in a clean house and minding his manners starts to grow. Miss Watson tells Huck he will go to “the bad place” if he does not behave, and Huck thinks that will be okay as long as Miss Watson is not there.
During the evening, Huck accidentally kills a spider that was on his shoulder and worries that bad luck will follow. When the town clock strikes twelve midnight, Huck hears a noise outside his window and climbs out to find Tom Sawyer waiting for him.
Analysis
The opening sentence of the novel notifies readers that Huck Finn is the narrator and will tell his story in his own words, in his own language and dialect (complete with grammatical errors and misspellings), and from his own point of view. By using the first person narrative point of view, Twain carries on the southwestern humor tradition of vernacular language; that is, Huck sounds as a young, uneducated boy from Missouri should sound.
This first sentence also alludes to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The allusion reminds the reader of a novel about boys and their adventures, the purpose of which, according to Twain, was to rekindle in adults memories “of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in.” Then Huck — and Twain — dismiss the work with “But that ain’t no matter.” Although the boyish type adventure episodes tend to reappear as a plot motif in Huck Finn, especially in the sections including Tom, their primary purpose is more to communicate criticism of Twain’s contemporary society than to evoke fond memories. This statement also makes clear that it does not matter whether readers have read Twain’s earlier book or not. Huck Finn is Huck’s story, and he will tell it from his natural, unsophisticated perspective.
This first chapter introduces several major literary elements. Humor is used in various ways in the novel, but Huck’s deadpan narration and pragmatic personality juxtaposed to events and beliefs that make no logical or practical sense to him provide much of the novel’s humor. Because Huck is young and uncivilized, he describes events and people in a direct manner without any extensive commentary. Huck does not laugh at humorous situations and statements simply because his literal approach does not find them to be funny; he fails to see the irony. He does not project social, religious, cultural, or conceptual nuances into situations because he has never learned them. For example, when Miss Watson tells Huck that “she was going to live so as to go to the good place [heaven],” Huck, applying what he knows about Miss Watson and the obvious lifestyle that makes her happy, responds that he “couldn’t see no advantage in going where she was going,” and makes up his mind to not try to get there. Huck does not intend his comment to be disrespectful or sarcastic; it is simply a statement of fact and is indicative of the literal, practical approach to life that he exhibits throughout the novel.
