Americana B - Huck Finn

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) is
commonly accounted as one of the first Great American Novels. It was also one
of the first major American novels ever written in the vernacular, or common
speech, being told in the first person by the eponymous Huckleberry "Huck"
Finn, best friend of Tom Sawyer (hero of three other Mark Twain books). The
book was first published in 1884.
In The Green Hills of Africa, Ernest Hemingway placed the novel in historical
context:
"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry
Finn… But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was
nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."
Norman Mailer, likewise, had great praise saying, "The mark of how good
Huckleberry Finn has to be is that one can compare it to a number of our best
modern American novels and it stands up page for page.”
The book is noted for its innocent young protagonist, its colorful description of
people and places along the Mississippi River, and its sober and often scathing
look at entrenched attitudes, particularly racism, of the time. The drifting
journey of Huck and his friend Jim, a runaway slave, down the Mississippi River
on their raft, may be one of the most enduring images of escape and freedom
in all of American literature.
Although the book has been popular with young readers since its publication,
and taken as a sequel to the comparatively innocuous The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer (which had no particular social message), it has also been the
continued object of study by serious literary critics. Although the Southern
society it satirized was already 40 years in the past by the time of publication,
it immediately became controversial, and has remained so to this day (see
"Controversy" below).
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
Mark Twain
Many white characters in the story are depicted as foolish, cruel or selfish, in
contrast to the main black character, Jim, who is depicted as wise and
unselfish, albeit uneducated and superstitious. The story is set before the
American Civil War, probably in the 1840s or 50s. Huck, as we know from Tom
Sawyer, is a loose-living young vagabond with no mother and an alcoholic
father. He meets Jim, a slave who is about to be sold down the river and
separated from his wife and children, and they attempt to go down the
Mississippi River and then up the Ohio to freedom. The book tells of their
adventures together.
Family is one of the most important themes in the book. The attempt by Huck's
father to gain custody of him in order to steal the money Huck and Tom had
found in the previous book precipitates his flight, staging his own murder to get
away. One of the major plot devices in the book is Jim's hiding the death of
Huck's father from him. As they travel the river, Huck is frequently involved
with families who attempt to adopt him.
Another theme is the life on the Mississippi River, alternately idyllic and
threatening. In true picaresque fashion, Huck and Jim encounter all the
varieties of humanity as they travel: murderers, thieves, confidence men, good
people and hypocrites.
In the middle of the story, Mark Twain comments on the irrationality of pride
and honor, as Huck sees brutal, cold-blooded murders committed by two
feuding families. Later on, a southern aristocrat coldly kills a drunk man yelling
empty threats at him, and the village turns the incident into a sort of circus,
ignoring the dead man's daughter while trying to start a lynch mob, which
quickly disintegrates after being mocked by the murderer himself. The King
and Duke, two infamous characters of the novel, attempt to con three
orphaned girls out of their late uncle's life savings. Towards the end of the
book, they are tarred and feathered, and carried out of town on a rail,
symbolizing how equally evil a village of people can be. Twain is also trying to
criticize monarchies by giving duke and the king "royal" names.
It is commonly said that the beginning and ending of the book, the parts in
which Tom Sawyer appears as a character, detract from its overall impact.
Others feel Tom serves to start the story off and to bring it to a conclusion, and
that Tom's ridiculous schemes have the paradoxical effect of providing a
framework of 'reality' around the mythical river voyage. Much of the boyhood
innocence and romantic depictions of nature occur in the first sixteen chapters
and the last five, while the middle of the story shows the harsh realities of
antebellum society.
Another theme is Huck's gradual acceptance of Jim as a man, strong, brave,
generous, and wise (though realistically portrayed as imperfect).
Its themes on religion are almost as strong as its race theme. Huck himself
comes across as religious but having trouble believing in God: although he tries
to pray, he finds it to be a waste of time. Later in the book, he encounters the
dilemma of whether or not to steal Jim out of slavery, believing that helping a
slave escape will condemn him to Hell. He eventually decides that he will help
Jim escape to freedom, even if it means Hell. In fact, Huck comes across as one
of the most unbiased, open-minded characters of popular literature as he
continually questions his own motivation and life in general throughout the
book. While he may not be pious, he does have a strong sense of right and
wrong and often acts out of moral conviction.
In another amusing commentary on 19th century society, Twain includes the
character of a deluded, unemployed drunkard who insists upon being
addressed as "Your Majesty" and claims to be the long-lost son of Louis XVI and
Queen Marie-Antoinette, who were both executed by French republicans in
1793. Their son, Louis XVII, died in a republican jail in 1795, but many
pretenders appeared all over the world claiming to be the young boy-king of
France. By the middle of the century they were becoming increasingly absurd
and unbelievable.
Controversy
Although the Concord, Massachusetts library banned the book immediately
after its publication because of its "tawdry subject manner" and "the coarse,
ignorant language in which it was narrated", the San Francisco Chronicle came
quickly to its defense on March 29, 1885:
"Running all through the book is the sharpest satire on the ante-bellum estimate of the slave.
Huckleberry Finn, the son of a worthless, drunken, poor white man, is troubled with many
qualms of conscience because of the part he is taking in helping the negro to gain his
freedom. This has been called exaggerated by some critics, but there is nothing truer in the
book."[1]
In the United States, occasional efforts have been made to restrict the reading
of the book. In addition to its Concord ban, it has, at various times, also been:
 excluded from the juvenile sections of the Brooklyn Public library and other libraries
 removed from reading lists due to alleged racism (e.g., in March of 1995 it was removed
from the reading list of 10th grade English classes at National Cathedral School in
Washington, DC, according to the Washington Post (a New Haven, Connecticut
correspondent to Banned Books Online reports it has been removed from a public school
program there as well).
 removed from school programs at the behest of groups maintaining that its frequent use of
the word nigger 215 times implies that the book as a whole is racist, despite what defenders
maintain is the overwhelmingly anti-racist plot of the book, its satirical nature, and the
anachronism of applying current definitions of polite speech to past times. Most movies shy
away from using the word nigger and showing Jim as the truly uneducated person that he is
in fear of insulting people also.
Russell Baker wrote:

"The people whom Huck and Jim encounter on the Mississippi are drunkards, murderers,
bullies, swindlers, lynches, thieves, liars, frauds, child abusers, numskulls, hypocrites,
windbags and traders in human flesh. All are white. The one man of honor in this
phantasmagoria is 'Nigger Jim,' as Twain called him to emphasize the irony of a society in
which the only true gentleman was held beneath contempt."[1]
The American Library Association ranked Huckleberry Finn the fifth most
frequently challenged (in the sense of attempting to ban) book in the United
States during the 1990s.
A character in the 1969 Nero Wolfe novel Death of a Dude by Rex Stout opines
that "All right, then, I'll go to hell," Huck's pronouncement on his own fate for
his decision to help Jim escape, is the single greatest sentence in American
literature. While that is rather a large claim, many critics would readily agree
that this is one of the greatest lines in American literature.

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