Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Chapter One Summary
- Meet Huck Finn, your narrator for the duration of the flight. He reminds you that you might already know him from a book named The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
- We know from the style right off the bat that Huck is a young boy, and that reading is going to be a lot like listening to a wild kid in the 19th century South talking, which means phrases like "There warn’t really anything the matter."
- Huck reveals that not too long ago he and his friend Tom Sawyer found $12,000 (which was even more money back then than it is now) in a cave. Still, because they’re kids, they gave the money to the resident magistrate (Judge Thatcher) for safe keeping.
- At present, Huck lives with the Widow Douglas and her sister Miss Watson near the Mississippi River.
- These women are trying to "sivilize" Huck, in the no-elbows-on-the-table, prayers-before-supper kind of way. Huck takes to this "civilizing" like a cow to the sun on a poppin’ hot day in July. We’re not sure what that means exactly, but it sounds like something Huck would say.
- Part of this "civilizing" involves teaching Huck about religion. At first he’s all gung-ho to learn about Moses.
- Then he realizes Moses is dead, and because Huck "[doesn’t] take no stock in dead people," he doesn’t care.
- Miss Watson is even tougher than her sister, and she threatens that Huck will go to hell if he doesn’t start behaving himself (which means sitting up straight at the dinner table).
- Huck, who doesn’t see any point in going to heaven, thinks this sounds just fine to him – especially because his good friend Tom Sawyer is likely going to hell and he’d rather they be together.
- After dinner Huck goes up to his bedroom and lights a candle. He can’t sleep and sits awake listening to the sounds of the woods outside, which he imagines are full of ghosts and the like.
- A spider crawls up Huck's shoulder and he flips it off. He realizes that, by accident, he flipped the spider into the candle and killed it. He knows this to be an "awful bad sign." After performing various good-luck ceremonies to counteract the bad luck that comes from killing a spider, Huck gives up and figures unlucky times are soon to follow.
- Still shaking from the spider incident, Huck sits down and pulls out his pipe for a smoke. (He figures this is okay because "the house was all as still as death now, and so the widow wouldn't know.") The clock strikes midnight, and soon afterward, Huck hears a "me-yow! me-yow!" that sounds particularly familiar to him. Huck meows back softly. He scrambles out of the window and down a shed and, sure enough, among the trees he finds Tom Sawyer waiting for him.
