While Mark Twain's imagination takes center stage in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and creates a world in which his characters are caught in implausible circumstances and situations, it nevertheless should not lose any credibility of its realism and of how things truly were in the Old South during slavery. A real fiction novel is often described as a plot that possesses realistic settings, situations and occurrences. It provides believable story lines and never leaves you guessing if something in the plot really could have happened. .
However, on the other end of the fiction spectrum is the fantasy fiction novel. The fantasy fiction novel's lines are purposely filled with adventure and sometimes-unbelievable happenings. It gives the imagination a wild and amusing ride, but it doesn't allow you to relate the plot to everyday life. What Twain has done in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is combine the two - real fiction and fantasy fiction - to assemble what many consider The Great American Novel. With its gamboling tale of Huck's adventure and moral growth as he floats down the Mississippi River with Jim, and while it captures the excitement and the diverse parade that was the United States during that period of the late 19th century, Twain was able to do all this while still exploring the heart of America's problem then, which was slavery and the hypocrisy that developed around it in the South. He took the most serious problem this country has ever seen, and shed a witty light over its dark shadow. Although the book used crude and offensive language towards slaves and gave a cruel depiction of the South, it would be hard to argue that the depiction was a horrible distortion of the truth. .
Admittingly, the tale of young Huck Finn's journey - between his brief stay in civilization at the Widow Douglas? House to his adventurous holdover with Tom Sawyer and Jim at Aunt Sally's place - Twain takes you on an emotional roller coaster ride that throughout gives a number of opportunities to question the amount of realism involved.
