Huckleberry Finn (Aloud)

New this summer for our Friday podcasts: Each Friday, Dr. Esolen will continue to read all of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn aloud, chapter by chapter!

Today’s reading is Chapter 8. Please excuse a blip at the beginning of the audio. We had to split last week’s recording for length. Happy listening!

Luther Daniels Bradly, Cartoonist.

Samuel Clemens appended the notice below to readers of Huckleberry Finn. He was joking (sort of). The book may have or may not have a motive or a moral in it; it certainly has no plot. But despite the author’s protestation, the book does reveal, directly and indirectly, many truths about human beings and all their foibles. If you are not smiling, or chuckling, or sometimes laughing out loud as you read of listen to a reading of Huck Finn, you have missed the point altogether. “Mark Twain” was a showman, a master teller of tales. And here he gives us a masterpiece of comic literature, in a setting as big as the mighty Mississippi itself and as small as the little raft afloat in it. — Debra

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.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR, Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance.

EXPLANATORY

IN this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary "Pike County" dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

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.