The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“NOTICE: Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” 

This epigrammatic warning shot is among the most quotable lines in Twain’s unusually quotable career. Much of 19th-century American literature was openly moralistic and reformative in rhetoric and tone, and so Twain’s opening strategy here is to disarm the reader. Indeed, the book was popular with children, its intended audience, who found little trace of the Sunday school atmosphere Huck himself so abhorred.

“In this book a number of dialects are used […] I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.” 

Modern readers are accustomed to books written partially or entirely in regional dialect, but Twain’s readers were not. The initial controversy surrounding The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn did not concern slavery, as it does now, but the idea that children would read “vulgarities” such as the contraction “ain’t,” thus taking them as normal.

“You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’ but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.” 

Later, Huck will claim authorship of his own book, stating on the last page that if he’d known how difficult it would be to write a book, he wouldn’t have done it. While The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was written from a third-person perspective, this sequel is told from Huck’s limited and unreliable first-person perspective.