Huck Finn by Mark Twain

This book is called The Great American Novel by many literary critics. It is a very good book. Still in reading this book, as good as it was, there is no way it can be called a great novel. Twain to me was as much as a satirist as a literary writer.

Huck Finn is often at the top of the list of books banned by libraries and schools across the country. Why? Well like Faulkner in the early twentieth century Twain in the nineteenth used some very racially colorful language. Other concerns were about references to Huck and the Slave Jim going naked on the raft.

These complaints are silly to us in the modern world. The story of Huck Finn is very strong. Still this material is dated. Dated in a way that does not mean it should be controversial but that simply the story is a bit contrived. To me, when Tom appears and he and Huck are making efforts to free Jim the repeated efforts to make the plot more complicated and dangerous do not age well. It is understood that Tom was raised on adventure stories and wants to live out his imagination but the plot and things they have Jim do seem a bit silly and unrealistic.

Of course Twain was writing about a time when Black people were kept in bondage and slavery so perhaps this was just one more layer of ridiculousness he was trying to exhibit to prove the point of how a society could claim to be all beneovelent and gracious as the Southern culture claimed and yet keep slaves. Huck struggles with this too. When he comments on how he thinks less of Tom for Tom saying he would help him free a slave and when he admits he will be going straight to Hell if helps Jim escapes he shows the conflict of the South.

This is a good book. I am glad I read it. Perhaps like much literature it is a matter of style, taste, and personal preference but to me putting Twain in the echelon of writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner and Steinbeck is something that requires a stretch of the nature of the whoppers told by Tom Sawyer.

Read it. Enjoy it. It is, however, overrated.