Jeremy Keeshin

Reading Discussion Entry #1

11/26/06
Chapter I – Chapter XV

John and I had our first discussion about the first 100 pages of the novel The Adventures

of Huckleberry Finn today. We talked mainly about the initial plot and got our bearings regarding

the main characters before we attempted to delve slightly into what their purpose or struggle

might be. We talked about Huck Finn and his cleverness and dexterity in his plot to fool the town

into thinking he was murdered. We noticed that Huckleberry’s character was rather prone to

lying and was very adept at fooling his community. We saw this in the instances with the murder

as well as when he fooled the lady into believing he was a different person. We talked about how

Jim and Huck lived on the lam together and how they became friends, and the role each had in

their friendship. We talked about Twain’s style of writing and how he used dialect to refine the

background of each character. We noted that it was difficult to understand the dialogue from Jim,

the runaway slave, because his manner of speaking was very different. We saw that both Huck

and Jim had the commonality of being treated poorly by their community, and that brought them

together: Huck’s drunken father abused him and Jim was a slave for the widow Miss Watson. We

talked about Huckleberry Finn and how he and Tom Sawyer and their friends had a gang, and the

comedic aspect of how they were all trying to be these things they were not that they had read

about in storybooks. The discussion was extremely fruitful and I felt that we got a very strong

basic layout of the novel.