Pablo Medina: Don Quixote and Huckleberry Finn: Partners in Crime (July 2002)

Pablo Medina explores the influence Cervante’s Don Quixote had on the character, scenes, and structure of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Showing how Twain drew on Cervante’s use of contrasting partners or pairs—one a mirror for fantasy, the other for reality–together exploring the human condition, Medina also suggests that the decaying chivalric code depicted in Don Quixote has parallels in the racist hypocrisies of Reconstruction that form the setting of Twain’s novel.