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Huck Finn picks up right where Tom Sawyer left off - Huck's abusive father appears to lay claim to Huck's fortune, so Huck fakes his own death and goes down the Mississippi River with Jim, the escaped slave. Well, maybe not. So is Huck Finn America's greatest novel. Hemingway was right: the end of Huck Finn is poor. So is the novel racist. Much like Tom Sawyer, there's not a lot of plot going on here most of the time, and that's okay, because Twain's writing is extremely entertaining.
But it's definitely up there. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel by Mark Twain, originally published in 1884. It is the sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Huck Finn has been exceedingly controversial because of the extensive use of the n-word.
Nobody could write a clever sentence like Twain, and most of that is lost here, although occasionally Huck will turn one (and by doing so break character, but that's the price you pay). Twain-as-narrator is definitely missed here. But more important to most people is whether Twain was racist; that is, whether he put his own personal racism in the book.
Perhaps the fairest thing to say is that Twain was genuinely criticizing racism, but the way in which he portrayed Jim and the other characters contains some residual racism of its own. After Jim is abducted and Tom Sawyer reappears, things just get silly, not to mention highly convenient (And Tom Sawyer here is just as immature as he ever was, reinforcing that no real maturation occurred in Tom Sawyer, and that that book really isn't a coming-of-age story in the truest sense). That is harder to determine, especially since Twain has made Huck the narrator. Ernest Hemingway (and many others) called it the greatest American novel ever.
Certainly the characters have the racism of the day ingrained in them - in that sense, it is racist. On the whole, this works, although it gets tiresome to read Huck's dialect sometimes. Twain has a good old time mocking social conventions, and the novel is gripping almost all the way through. Twain has made Huck the narrator.
But it was, I tell you, it was. I was down in the dumps I was. Wonderin' when my Huck Finn would come, and wonderin' if it would be righ' on time.
"Ambivalence" is the word that comes to mind when discussing this, Twain's supposed masterpiece, and the term that also comes to mind when considering the state of race relations among the leading thinkers in our nation during most of its history. Tom is the 19th Century Everyman who finds every excuse in the book not to release Jim until he is forced to admit publicly that this former piece of property has already been set free legally. Like Huck, Twain began life in a lower-middle class, slaveowning family, and like Huck, the author slowly grew less tolerant of overt racism. After all, we ask, would it be fair to judge 19th Century morality through the prism of 21st Century democracy.
Like Jefferson, who said all men are created equal but who, unlike Washington, simply could not bring himself to free his slaves, Twain paints a narrative of gradualism - ultimately, not through Huck Finn, but through his majoritarian stand-in, Tom Sawyer - and Twain seems content with it.A major bonus of this 2001 Modern Library Classics edition is the thought-provoking introductory essay by George Saunders of Syracuse University and the collection of shorter, back-of-the-book commentaries, which in their own way clearly demonstrate the slow evolution of race relations in our country. And so, for the final one-fifth of the book, we are made to watch Jim surrender to Tom and Huck's nonsensical games, thwarting what had been the almost inexorable progression of a moralistic plot line, and disappointing this reader to no end. Those passages could have been construed as the author's surreptitious way of commenting on the racism of his time, but that argument begins to collapse as the moral imperative of Twain's plot crumbles. It is ironic, and indeed somewhat fitting, that the cover testimonial for this edition comes from H.L. In the end, no amount of adoration for Twain's wonderful caricatures of bumpkins and hoboes or for passing moments of hilarity can compensate for the disappointing conclusion to this "beloved" book. Twain published "Huckleberry Finn" past the halfway point in this time line, and it stands as a fascinating monument to how even "enlightened" leaders viewed the race question at the cusp of the 20th Century.Twain's work continues to be heralded for its descriptive prose and rendering of river life, for its spot-on use of dialect and its clever plot and dialogue; but in the end, all that matters is the author's treatment of the race question.
In twisting what a vast majority of readers expect and are waiting for, Samuel Clemens may be making clear what he felt about some of the tougher, racially-tinged exchanges in his book. Mencken, who hails "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" as "One of the great masterpieces of the world." As someone who derided the "booboisie" and evidenced a streak of intolerance in his own public utterances, perhaps the choice of this particular endorsement is more fitting that one might realize.Read this work by Twain as a compelling historical record first - and if you can stand to, as an "entertainment" second. That sort of almost grudging transformation is on full display in this epic work, and for most of it, we take our own grudging, yet sympathetic view of Huck and Twain. That laissez-faire approach by the reader comes to a crashing halt, however, when we realize that we have been led "down the river" by Twain through his boyhood alter ego, Tom Sawyer, who - like so many of his time (and even like some of us today) - find a million rationales as to why the black man must undergo additional inconvenience to suit the white man's whims.
But for Twain to write of a kind of comradeship between a slave and a young white boy was definitely progressive. This was counter to the way whites were acting with and around blacks at the time (1880s). Yes, that meant there was a time when the word "colored" was used by people who considered themselves progressive in terms of racial attitudes. But in the Antebellum South the use of the N word was thrown around quite easily. I think it's clear based on a certain reading of the novel that Twain believed whites and blacks could and should get along. The list goes on and on. While the knee-jerk reaction is that Jim is a total vaudevillian caricature of what the perception was of blacks in the Antebellum South, his relationship with Huck Finn was something to be viewed as progressive. Before that it was Afro-Americans, coloreds, Negr--s.
I can't say more on the plot because it's quite obvious what the plot is just from illustrations of the novel. For us today "all men are created equal" is a statement of truth provided we all have a level playing field. Remember that a decade before the novel came out; Reconstruction was over and left things a mess in terms of race relations. This was the way things were in their society for over two hundred years and the Civil War didn't suddenly end that sentiment among the many. And persons added positive as well as negative adjectives to it. It's strange to imagine that. But on the "controversial" aspect of the novel involving the excessive use of the N word, people have to think of the time period that Twain is writing about and when the novel was published. The novel takes place in Missouri (a slave border state) in the 1830s.
This friendship (which is why Huck decides to do what he does on the journey) is what Twain emphasized in the journey down river. But for many southern whites at the time this was hard to swallow. There was a lot of bitterness in the South over the Civil War (probably the most destructive war at the time until WWI), and a whole generation of southern white men took it personally when they were expected to be on the same level in terms of voting rights and other things with men that was formerly human property. And in the Antebellum South, just below poor whites were blacks. But even when Twain published the novel in the 1880s the word was unfortunately not yet out of fashion.
Huck and Jim work together in schemes and have fun. While today it may not be seen as "progressive", it was when it was first published. Maybe Twain was hoping to reach a young generation raised by their bitter parents and discover that they could have friendships with blacks and not succumb to an entrenching separatist animosity that developed into the Jim Crow Era. We use the term African-American or black now. In an aristocratic agrarian society, some men are just superior to others.
Also consider the way Twain writes of Jim, the runaway slave. The overall attitude was that as the terms changed the previous one was seen as more offensive than the progressive current one. We today only think of it in a totally negative way.
These adventures are a classic. Huck and Jim are on the run from an abusive father and the law, respectively, and Twain shows all people have a great deal in common, in spite of theories prevalent in the antebellum era.I'm not sure why Tom Sawyer needs to show up to conclude this thing. Everyone should read or re-read this classic. The royals were a hoot, how many failed fraudulent enterprises could they invent before the inevitable tar and feathering. The ending could work without him, maybe Twain not sure that Finn could carry the book or film alone. Most of us read it in school, probabaly not in its entirety. Schools struggled then and now with the use of the N word, although teenage boys in the 1830's clearly would never have heard a synonym.
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