Review: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

 

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain takes Huck from his adventures with Tom Sawyer and lets him loose on his own – largely accompanied by the escaped slave, Jim. In his adventures, he learns about being civilized – from Jim, the King, the Duke, the minister, and others. The truly civilized person is Jim – the others are false. Meeting up with Tom at the end of the novel, Huck expresses his thoughts on being civilized.

His thoughts in what it means to be civilized build through the book as the story carries him through his adventures – his conclusions are worth considering.

Twain uses the varying dialects of his South in writing the novel which takes a little getting use to.  Another point that makes this a controversial book for some is the persistent use of the “n-word.”

The latter of these observation leads one to ask the question of the novel:  should it be “banned”? Should it be “sanitized”? Or should it be left as it is as a challenge to understand what Huck means by the word and what the word meant in Twain’s time.

I think the latter is the appropriate choice.  However, reading the text and understanding the use of that word is different from speaking it and using it. That word has come to have a vile and disgusting meaning in our time – far beyond anything it ever meant before. I would argue that if the text is read aloud, the word should be substituted with “n-word,” and I would argue that the word itself should never be used by anyone of any race for any purpose – it is that charged and vile a word today.

I purchased the “Norton Critical Edition” of the novel for the original drawings and because of the explanatory notes and essays, critical essays, chronology, and selected bibliography. I have only scanned these thus far – I believe the primary source should be read and considered first before looked at any secondary sources.

[This review appears on my blog, Amazon.com, and Goodreads.com].