Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: 135-Years-Old and as Timeless as Ever
By Aidan Trembath
A tale of innocent whimsy and piercing social commentary, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1885, masterfully interweaves the wide-world wonders of youth with the author’s sober observations of racism, slavery, familial dysfunctionality, and the feuding of households in nineteenth-century American frontier. The story follows the Mississippi-voyage of Huckleberry Finn and his companion, Jim, as they encounter wily rapscallions and village drama in their efforts to flee their respective domestic predicaments. Finn, a boy running from a domineering father, and Jim, an escaped slave, form an inseparable bond that transcends Finn’s socially ingrained impulse to return Jim to his place of servitude. Toward the novel’s climax, Finn reunites with a long-cherished friend from another famous Mississippi-novel of Twain’s, Tom Sawyer, and the two hatch an impossibly elaborate plan to help an imprisoned Jim escape from his captors (who ultimately become sympathetic to him). In the end, Jim becomes a free individual as per the request of his owner, and Sawyer jubilantly exclaims “he’s as free as any cretur that walks this earth” (Twain, 217).
Twain’s Huckleberry Finn illustrates the language and customs of a nineteenth-century America, making the novel as much a valuable historical tome of cultural and lingual significance as an enrapturing storyteller. Finn’s southern dialect, demonstrated as he recalls his experiences in the first-person, comprises the narrative prose of the novel. The grammar and spelling is improper, but Twain explains that the multitude of dialects he employs in the novel represents his finely tuned understanding of the methods of speaking he grew up with. Twain’s novel stands as not only a supreme article of storytelling but a time-travelling insight into the multiple speeches of southern Americans during the nineteenth-century.
The novel’s theme of discrimination and dissection of the evils of slavery are as applicable to today’s prevalence of systemic racism as they were prescient for an author writing in the nineteenth-century. Finn’s declaration, that he would rather “go to hell” (Twain, 162) than alert Jim’s slaver of Jim’s whereabouts, speaks volumes of Twain’s distaste towards slavery and his sympathy towards those discriminated by an American state and culture founded on social inequalities. 135 years later, Finn’s condemnation of racist social systems ring as loudly as ever today. As many countries revaluate the racism lodged in their respective political cultures, Twain’s wisdom from more than a century ago illustrates that racism has intergenerational consequences that require a diligent pan-societal effort to address and resolve.
Work Cited
Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1994. Dover Publications, Inc., New York.