huckleberry fin

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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn..

Was Mark Twain really racist or not when he wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? Of Mark Twain's entire literature collection, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remains the most questioned of them all. It has been said to have the most racist views of any American novel and you could clearly tell by the words from the novel. However, humans today are fascinated with real life situations, tagged in with fictional story line and in this novel Twain describes this real life situation perfectly. Twain put the real life happenings of slavery, in a fun and fictional story. The novel is the noblest, greatest, and most adventuresome novel the world, but the point in the novel is about the racial relations between each human. In his book, Twain was not intending the novel to be a racist novel, but instead a novel of slavery protest. The slavery described in the book was only done so because that is how it really was in the time period the book was written.

Mark Twain has a style of his own and when he wrote this novel he seemed to be writing as though through the actual voice of Huck. Every word, thought, and speech by Huck is so precise that it refle

cts even the racism and black stereotypes typical of the era. As a result of that, it lead to many conflicting battles by various critics since the first print of the novel. However, not all readers had bad concerns over the novel either and actually had some good things to say about the novel. A man named John H. Wallace was one of the outraged by Twain's constant use of the degrading and white supremacist word "nigger" and said "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the most grotesque example of racist trash ever written" (mark Twain Journal by Thadious Davis, Fall 1984 and Spring 1985). On the other hand to counter that outrageous remark, a man named

Look at that Huck Finn. Reared in racism, like all the white kids in his town. And then, on the river, on the raft with Jim, shucking off that blind ignorance because this runaway slave is the most honest, perceptive, fair-minded man this white boy has ever known. What a book for the children, all the children, in Warrington, Pennsylvania, in 1982! (Adventures of Huck Finn, edited by Gerald Graff and James Phelan, 365).

Huckleberry is an important character and he acts based about his own morals. Despite the Widow Douglas's and Miss Watson's attempt to "civilize" Huck by teaching, sheltering, and instructing him on how to behave, Huck's actions throughout the novel do not always reflect their teachings. To show this, Twain tell us how Huck neither advocated slavery nor does he protest against it. He sees slavery as a natural occurrence in daily life and the inferior disposition of slavery to be a little significance. Whenever a situation occurs that requires Huck to assist Jim, Huck does so accordingly to his own moral standards. He may agitate over the morality of helping a runaway nigger, as southern society condemns the act, but his own love for Jim allows Huck to accept his own "wickedness". An example of this is when Huck says:

I come to being lost and going to hell.. and got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time.. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him...how good he always was...I was the best friend old Jin ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now..I will steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too..."

makes the novel appear very boyish and "reminiscent of the Mother Goose nursery rhyme on what boys are made of."

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Approximate Word count = 1660
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Novels