Huck Finn. Twain.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Mark Twain.
New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. 1884 (1982).

Why read it? Novel. A combination of hilarious scenes and a deep, deep understanding of the tragedy of slavery. No textbook can convey as this novel does the depths of degradation to which slaves were reduced by whites and the human feelings of the slaves.

Twain re-creates the times. He puts the N-word into the context of the times and its use conveys the hatred and the view of the Negro, not as a person, not as a human being, but as a thing, an object, property. His realistic use of the N-word in the context of the times is the reason the novel is so often censored. It is not the number of times the word is used but the vivid expression of the feelings of repulsion toward Negroes by Southerners.

But the story is hilarious. Huck’s concealing bread and butter under his hat on a hot day, the butter oozing down his forehead and shocking Aunt Sally into thinking he has brain disease is a funny scene as is Pap’s ranting against Negroes and falling into the tub of salt pork. He kicks the tub in response to his humiliation and then writhes on the ground nursing his sore, bare toes. Also funny are the characters Jim and Huck meet as they raft down the Mississippi, the bamboozlers and phonies.

The heart of the novel is Huck’s wrestling with his conscience over whether to do the “right” thing—turn Jim in as an escaped slave—or the “wrong” thing—help him to become free. In the end, Jim was free anyway, set free by Miss Watson’s will before she died and Tom Sawyer simply wanted to have the adventure of freeing him.

Best sentences: “Jim talked out loud…was saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free state he would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent, and when he got enough he would buy his wife, which was owned on a farm close to where Miss Watson lived; and then they would both work to buy the two children, and if their master wouldn’t sell them, they’d get an Ab’litionist to go and steal them.”

Huck: “Here was this … which I had as good as helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children—children that belonged to a man I didn’t even know, a man that hadn’t ever done me no harm…sorry to hear Jim say that, it was such a lowering of him.”