Huckleberry Finn Timeline and Summary

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• Huck resists being taught knowledge, religion, and etiquette by Miss Watson and the Widow. In that order.
• While the Widow is trying to civilize him, he gets up to hijinks, pranking Miss Watson's slave Jim and playing with Tom and some others boys in a kind of cops 'n robbers game.
• We learn all about Huck's drunken Pap, so we approve when Huck gives all his money to Judge Thatcher based on having a bad feeling. And it's not heartburn.
• Huck actually starts to like school—and then, when he's kidnapped by his abusive dad, he starts liking his filthy life in a shack down by the river. (He's easy to please.)
• But eventually it gets to be too much, and he fakes his own death using pig's blood and jets off to Jackson's Island.
• Surprise! Jim—now a runaway—is also there.
• They team up and have more hijinks, including pranks, crossdressing, falling in with robbers, and then getting separated.
• Huck has some moral conflict about whether it's right to help Jim escape, but he also gradually starts to think of Jim as, you know, an actual person.
• After a steamboat crashes through their raft, Huck is taken in by the Grangerfords by pretending to be George Jackson.
• Huck befriends Buck. Dr. Seuss is amused.
• After sneaking a note from Harney Shepherdson to Sophia Grangerford, Huck witnesses Buck's death and gets a big wakeup call.
• He falls in with the duke and king, two conmen. After a while, he gets a little fed up with all this lying and conning, particularly when a pretty girl and her an enormous inheritance are thrown into the mix.
• Eventually, he and Jim try to escape from the duke and king.
• They fail. Jim is captured, and Huck ends up pretending to be their nephew, Tom Sawyer.
• Huck intercepts Tom Sawyer before he gets to the farm, and they scheme elaborate ways to free Jim.
• These plans fail.
• Eventually, Huck finds out that Jim and free and his father is dead.
• With these checked off his list, he plans to head out west for more adventures.