One More Cup of Coffee

There are few novels that nosedive and soar so sporadically as that of Twain’s Huck Finn. It began as a capitalization on his prior work of Tom Sawyer, but quickly turned into a magnum opus of Americana. In order to fit that theme, the material must break the mold entirely. People say often (similar to Kubrick’s Full-Metal Jacket) that you should really stop experiencing the art around the end of the third quarter of the book. In that way it is wholly American, messy and composed. It is also a terribly ambiguous story. For all of the caricatures and pageantry, it is a very ambiguous book, just at the semi-threatening prelude would suggest, definitely the most neutral book I’ve ever read, and I’ve read six of those things.

So what can be extracted from this novel of chief importance? I prefer to break it down like this: when I was in the Nut-Hut, I had more time than I knew what to do with and very few venues of entertainment; what I would do was get a book, read it through and plot everything out in my head as if I was adapting a movie. This is what I propose to do with Huck Finn, find the most powerful, the most effective and impactful scenes based on what impact I feel they would make cinematically as a judge of their true merit. What would be the famous scene people revisit on YouTube years after its release? What would it be lauded on for theoretically?

Starting the list of important scenes off is the portion of chapter thirty-one wherein Huck grapples with social ideals and his personal judgment. He has a message he means to send to Mrs. Watson, the owner of Jim, an escaped slave and Huck’s companion on the Mississippi, proclaiming Jim’s whereabouts and the location of her lost “property”. Now, in the nineteenth century a...

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...t hooligan and a boy raised proper.

Throughout all of these scenes, there are several one could pinpoint as a favorite, such as Huck’s incidental rendezvous with Jim on the island, the snake bite, even the entire odyssey up the Mississippi. Though at the end of the day, his name’s in the title, and I feel the two listed above are primo examples of the true essence of the character, an intelligent and forsaken kid, a prodigal rogue in limitless denial with strong yet backward ideals and an even thicker accent. Yet still there is no chivalry, he wavers before doing the good or the bad, distracted by the ugliness of this world and his situation. Aside from the grandeur of action scenes and the cavalcade of things scene in this strange trek through the south, I feel these are some of the most important scenes concerning the trueborn adventures of one Huckleberry Finn.