Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

First, shame on you if you haven’t yet read Mark Twain’s classic novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which might be the “great American novel.” Put aside this blog and crack open the book (or flip to a free copy on your iPad) and read it before continuing to my thoughts about the novel.

Okay, now that we’re all on the same page, so to speak, let’s look at some controversies surrounding the novel.

Oddly enough, the primary controversy in Twain’s lifetime, and the reason the novel was occasionally banned, isn’t the problem that has caused protests in our time. Almost immediately upon its publication in 1885, Huck Finn generated complaints because its protagonist is such a realistic boy from the lower class. In other words, he curses, plays hooky, and has no use for Sunday school. He also has the temerity to befriend a runaway slave, Jim, which completely contradicts the social mores of the time. Huck, in short, is definitely not a role model for young boys.

Twain, however, didn’t mind that Huck Finn caused such a ruckus that it was banned from the Concord, Massachusetts, public library. As I pointed out in the first of my two books about him, upon hearing the news, Twain exulted to one of his business agents, “That will sell 25,000 copies for us sure.” He was undoubtedly pleased, then, that his novel was regularly banned from libraries over the next 25 years of his life.

In our time, of course, the primary reason that Huck Finn has been banned is because of the word “nigger.”

It’s a troubling and unsettling word, no doubt, and on some pages of the novel, it seems like nearly every other word is “nigger,” which has led a number of school boards and libraries to ban the book as being racist. While I don’t doubt that that the novel’s language can cause pain, and therefore it needs to be discussed and taught with sensitivity, it’s clearly not a racist book.

First, and most obvious, the novel’s narrator, Huck, is using the only word he knows to describe the slaves that he sees in the Mississippi River valley ca. 1845. It’s never been a word used in polite society, but it was an everyday word, especially for people in Huck’s social class, and it’s really just a descriptive word for a black person, free or slave, in that time period in that part of the United States. In other words, when someone uses that word today, he undoubtedly wants to inflict emotional pain or start a fight, but the characters in the novel (aside from Pap, who is definitely abusive and violent) have no such intent. Just as I say “table” to describe a flat surface with four legs at waist-level, Huck Finn says “nigger” to describe a black person. Indeed, even Jim uses the word “nigger” to refer to himself or to other blacks.

Complicating matters, however, is that Twain certainly understood the paradox of Huck using that word so freely, especially after it’s clear that he has come to see Jim as a friend. For example, consider this passage late in the novel, which occurs when Huck, pretending to be Tom Sawyer, explains to Aunt Sally why his steamboat was late:

It warn’t the grounding—that didn’t keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head.

Good gracious! anybody hurt?

No’m. Killed a nigger.

Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.

It’s clear to me, from this passage, and from a few others in the novel, that Twain is offering a sort of dramatic irony to make a point about racism. In other words, Huck doesn’t grasp the significance of what he has just said (he doesn’t have a clue that it’s repugnant), but Twain’s readers do understand. In short, Twain shows us the callousness of Southern slaving-holding society in this scene, even though Huck and Aunt Sally don’t “get” their own callousness. I would argue that Huck and Aunt Sally certainly are racists but the book and its author are not. It’s a subtle distinction, one that is undoubtedly often lost except to careful readers, but it’s a crucial one.

Of course, one can also argue, with some evidence from the text and from Twain’s own reflections on the novel, that I’m probably over analyzing this passage. After all, Twain himself, not entirely tongue in cheek, warned at the beginning of the novel:

PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.