In chapter 7 of Mark Twain's The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, while hunting with Pap, Huckleberry hides an abandoned canoe and
also retrieves a raft from the river. This Pap takes to town to sell after having locked
Huckleberry in the cabin as he was accustomed to do. But the boy, having earlier begun to saw
through the logs of the cabin completes his work, escapes, leaves a clever subterfuge to convince
his father that he has been murdered by robbers, and takes the canoe downstream to Jackson's
Island, an apparently deserted stretch of land in the middle of the Mississippi. There, a few
days later he stumbles upon Jim, Miss Watson's runaway slave; it is from Jackson's Island that
Jim and Huckleberry begin their odyssey down the river.
When
Huckleberry reaches the "free world" of Jackson's Island, he believes he has found his true
destiny. With his staged death behind him, and disentangled from the Widow Douglas' "sivilized"
domesticity, Huck anticipates a new existense in a transformed world: "But the next day I was
exploring around down through the Island. I was boss of it; it all belonged to me, so to say, and
I wanted to know all about it." Located in the unspoken meaning at the margin of Twain's text,
the reader finds Huck unconsciously embracing the bedrock American dream of creating a new world
free of the dilemmas through which Huck has had to make his odyssey.
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