Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Character Guide

Spoiler-free — fuller detail (with spoilers, if you want them) lives in the reader's Guide tab.

Huckleberry Finn (Huck)

The novel's narrator, a poor, uneducated boy who chafes under attempts to 'sivilize' him by the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson.

Tom Sawyer

Huck's friend, a romantic dreamer obsessed with adventure books who leads a pretend gang of robbers.

Jim (Miss Watson's Jim)

An enslaved man belonging to Miss Watson who runs away after overhearing he is to be sold down the river, and joins Huck on the raft.

Widow Douglas

A kind but proper woman who takes Huck in and tries to civilize and educate him.

Miss Watson

The Widow Douglas's sister, a stern, religious woman who owns Jim and lectures Huck on manners and piety.

Pap Finn

Huck's abusive, drunken father who reappears demanding Huck's money and later kidnaps him to a cabin in the woods.

Judge Thatcher

The local judge who holds Huck and Tom's treasure money in trust.

The Duke

A con man traveling the river who joins Huck and Jim, claiming to be a disinherited English duke.

The King (the Dauphin)

An older con man traveling with the Duke, claiming to be the lost French dauphin; together they scheme and swindle towns along the river.

Colonel Grangerford

The head of an aristocratic Southern family who takes Huck in after a steamboat accident separates him from Jim.

Mary Jane Wilks

A kind-hearted young woman whose family the King and Duke attempt to defraud of an inheritance.

Glossary

Sivilize / sivilized

Huck's spelling/pronunciation of 'civilize'—used throughout to mean being taught manners, religion, and respectable behavior.

Rapscallions

Rogues or scoundrels; used to describe the King and Duke.

Trot line

A fishing line with multiple hooks left set across a river to catch fish passively.

Doggery

A cheap saloon or drinking establishment.

Honest injun

A period expression used as an oath meaning 'I swear it's true.'

Nigger stealer

A period term used by other characters to accuse someone of helping enslaved people escape—reflects the era's racist vocabulary and social attitudes toward abolition.

Territory

Unsettled frontier land west of the Mississippi not yet organized as a state, symbolizing freedom from civilization at the novel's end.

Evasion

Tom Sawyer's term for his elaborate, book-inspired plan to free Jim, mimicking prisoner-escape stories from romantic literature.

Royal Nonesuch

The fraudulent, bawdy stage show the King and Duke perform to swindle townspeople out of money.

Pike County dialect

A regional American dialect from Missouri/Illinois that Twain explicitly renders phonetically in the novel's 'Explanatory' note.

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