What is the significance of the opening scene in huckleberry finn

Her sister, Miss Watson, tries to give Huck spelling lessons. These efforts are not in vain, as Huck does in fact learn to read. Huck feels especially restless because the Widow and Miss Watson constantly attempt to improve his behavior. This proclamation causes an uproar. Huck accidentally flicks a spider into a candle, and the bad omen frightens him.

From the start, Huck speaks to us in a conversational tone that is very much his own but that also serves as a mouthpiece for Twain. The events in Tom Sawyer have already established Huck as a somewhat marginal character in the town of St.

Although he is white, he is poor and therefore out of touch with civilized society. Though Huck always remains open to learning, he never accepts new ideas without thinking, and he remains untainted by the rules and assumptions of the white society in which he finds himself.

Though quick to comment on the absurdity of much of the world around him, Huck is not mean-spirited. We see quickly that, in the town of St. Petersburg, owning slaves is considered normal and unremarkable—even the Widow Douglas, a pious Christian, owns slaves. Twain implicitly contrasts this type of slavery with the more brutal form of plantation slavery, in which hundreds of slaves worked for a single master, creating greater anonymity between slave and master, which in turn led to more backbreaking labor—and, often, extreme cruelty.

Some critics have accused Twain of painting too soft a picture of slavery by not writing about plantation slaves. Huck was fourteen years old in the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Petersburg, Missouri.

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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.

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. 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.