The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Author:

Mark Twain

Edition:

125th (Mark Twain Library) Edition

Summary:

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn explores themes such as race and identity. A complexity exists concerning Jim’s character. While some scholars point out that Jim is good-hearted, moral, and he is not unintelligent (in contrast to several of the more negatively depicted white characters), others have criticized the novel as racist, citing the use of the n-word and emphasizing the stereotypically “comic” treatment of Jim’s lack of education, superstition and ignorance.

Throughout the story, Huck is in moral conflict with the received values of the society in which he lives, and while he is unable to consciously refute those values even in his thoughts, he makes a moral choice based on his own valuation of Jim’s friendship and Jim’s human worth, a decision in direct opposition to the things he has been taught. Mark Twain, in his lecture notes, proposes that “a sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience” and goes on to describe the novel as “…a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat”.

Overall, Twain’s work is considered by many to be a masterpiece of American literature, while its themes of equality, tensions between nature and society, and race permeate the great social, political, and theological questions of every age.

– Huckleberry Finn. In Wikipedia.  Retrieved December 3, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventures_of_Huckleberry_Finn