[H] Henry: Chapters 01-03

Unlike The Scarlet Letter or Benito Cereno, the narrator in Adventures of Huckleberry Fin is in fact the main character, Huck. In the first three chapters, Huck leads us through his adventures with Tom Sawyer, Jim, and the boys in Tom’s “gang.” However, how much can Huck be trusted as a narrator. He starts the novel by telling us about the writer of the popular book Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain (writer of Huck Finn also), saying, “There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied, one time or another...” Right off the bat, Huck Finn practically admitting that he will have the tendency to stretch the truth. Furthermore, how safe can the reader feel when the narrator portrays himself as a mischievous child with aspirations to be a crook. And there are scenes in the first three chapters where the reader does think twice about what Huck is claiming to be the truth. For example, when Tom is starting the gang, “Everybody that wants to join has got to take an oath, and write his name is blood… And if anybody that belonged to the band told the secrets, he must have his throat cut, and then have his carcass burned up and the ashes scattered all around…” Tom is setting us up for being an extremely unreliable narrator.

Furthermore, Huck seems to be extremely naïve in his first encounter with Jim. Huck and Tom are described as being inches away from Jim and yet they still think that Jim is oblivious to their presence. It is in fact Huck and Tom that are being oblivious to Jim’s intelligence. He uses the boys and lets them play tricks on him. This enables him to fabricate the stories he tells about witchcraft and in the end enables him to get closer to the boys who are, after all, in a position of power over him.