Mark Twain . The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn In The American Literature

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MARK TWAIN . THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN IN THE AMERICAN LITERATURE

Motto: “I am not an American, I am the American”

Mark Twain

Ernest Hemingway, in his Nobel Prize reception speech: “I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain.”

William Dean Howells about Mark Twain: “The Lincoln of Literature”

Eugene O’Neill: “Mark Twain is the true father of all American literature.”

William Faulkner: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”

INTRODUCTION

The “civilian” Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835, two weeks after Halley Comet made the closest passage to the Earth this very year. The said gentleman passed away on April 21st 1910, a day after the comet made another close passage to our planet. His pen name is Mark Twain.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published in London on 4 December 1884 under the title The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and then in New York in February of the following year under the title Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The beginning and the end of the book are misleading: resuming the light tone of the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, depicting characters from this novel, they suggest that there is a “collection” and “literature for children”. But the body of the narrative is not inoffensive. It is a terrifying dive into the darkest of human nature, a violent questioning of social norms and religion.

ANALYZE

The narrator is a young boy who flees “sivilisation” in the company of an escaped slave. He recounts their wanderings of nearly 1,800 kilometers on a raft descending the Mississippi. The innocent gaze of the child on the defects of the civilized people met on the way nourishes the virulent satire of a hypocritical society, which reverses the notions of good and evil. Less well-known than The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (which is, indeed, a "book for youth"), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is often regarded as the masterpiece of Twain, and as the founding book of literature American style: it is by the profoundly innovative style of this novel that it would have begun to detach itself from English literature, in order to exist by itself. In 2007, a survey of 125 Anglo-Saxon writers classifies the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as the fifth best book of all time and all countries. However, Tom Sawyer remains a novel of the green paradise of childhood, a preserved domain where one plays the thieves, the pirates, the treasure seekers, where one lives in the dream. Huckleberry Finn's comment is otherwise bleak. His hero is rubbing himself with real life, with civilized adults as in themselves. It is a disturbing dive into the depths of human nature. Huck's candid eye denounces all that one tries to impose on him; he challenges religion, social and behavioral norms, and flushes out the hypocrisies of those who claim to educate it. We note that Huckleberry Finn changes register when Tom enters the scene, at the beginning and at the end of the narrative: it sounds like a recreation; the tone is more futile and light. Another notable difference with Tom Sawyer's Adventures is the choice of first-person narrative. The result is a much stronger structure, but also a style imitating spoken language. The language varies according to the characters, Twain warning that he uses several dialects in the book: that of the blacks of Missouri, the most extreme form of that of the wildest corners of the Southwest, the most common form of the so-called "Pike County", and four variants of the latter.

Through this novel Mark Twain operates a true revolution in American literature. American commentators indeed look at Twain as the creator of a style. He knows how to draw from the dialects of the Mississippi Valley a literary form which will progressively impose itself in front of English, to become American prose. Thanks to Twain, American literature ceases to be only a branch of English literature, and finally exists by itself.

LITERARY GENRE

Twain's novel presents many characters that bring it closer to the picaresque genre.

• Huck's narration is autobiographical. The narrator is at the bottom of the social ladder. Vagabond whose father is a wreck, Huck does not hesitate to lie, to steal, he is resourceful, adapts to all situations. He rejects social values. Huck seems condemned to remain a wanderer. He tries many times to integrate into society, but either by his own will or by force of circumstances, experience runs short. A benevolent widow adopts him: Huck cannot stand this narrow life. A judge returns him to his unworthy father who, in his delirium, fails to kill him: Huck prefers to flee. It is a realistic novel, regionalist, benefiting from the intimate knowledge that Twain has of his native South. The reality is described without contentment. If the talk is often funny, the sordid and violence are also present.

• It is a satirical novel. The itinerant structure of the narrative allows the meeting of representative characters of a social category: two rigid bourgeoisies, a man of the woods, a slave, bandits, a wealthy owner, and so on. The innocent gaze of the child throws a crude light on the aberrations of men, on their prejudices, their cruelty, their cowardice, their folly, their absurd conduct. Moralist outraged, Twain signs there a pessimistic novel. His hero witnesses the triumph of hypocrisy and falsehood, adorned with the rags of virtue. He goes so far as to say, "There was really something to be ashamed of the human race.”

MAIN THEMES OF THE NOVEL

The theme of the good and the bad has a very realistic approach. Controversial, humorous and complex, the book tells the story of a child fleeing civilization. Throughout his encounters, he observes that evil and good can cohabit strangely in the same civilized person. More precisely, it would seem that, as in the myth of the good savage, good belongs to the instinct of man, and that civilization undertakes to introduce evil: the two least educated personages, a vagabond and a slave, are the good of the book; while the most distinguished trader of a city proves to be the most stupid criminal.

The central theme of the book is thus the conflict that takes place in Huck between the repulsive prejudices inoculated by the right people ("the good") and the beautiful attitude that a very sure instinct dictates ("the evil").

For the morality of the civilized in fact offers a totally inverted conception of good and evil. Thus, slavery, on which the Southern society rests, is represented as the good. And religion is called to the rescue of this inversion of values. In the South, says Twain, “people filled with wisdom, like those full of goodness, like those full of holiness, are at this time unanimously convinced that slavery is fair, just, sacred, God's great favor, and a situation which one must show each day and every night grateful for.”

While the book paints a realistic picture of southern society prior to the Civil War, especially denouncing slavery and racism, it contains, above all, a universal reflection on how civilized man corrupts the concepts of Good and evil – and deceives his world by showing himself otherwise roughly kind. Huck is obviously looking for a presentable human, whom he could admire and look up to. He is unaware of the death of his degenerate father. What he understands little by little, however, is that he found in the noble person of Jim a father worthy of this name.

RECEPTION

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been controversial since its publication in the United States. If enthusiastic voices do not hesitate to compare the book with those of Cervantes or Moliere, some critics reproach the lack of credibility of the hero, his disrespect to religion, his denial of the authority of adults. Others denounced as vulgar and grammatically incorrect the popular language of Huck. Others declare his adventures immoral, sacrilegious – inappropriate to the infantile readership. Characterized as “rough, coarse, and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people,” Huckleberry Finn is removed from several libraries.

As the time passed, Huckleberry Finn has not finished with the controversies. Around 1950, the spirits were heated over the last chapters (somehow taken in hand by Tom Sawyer, who strives to trample on realism, the seriousness of the narrative). The quarrel opposes Leo Marx, who attacks these last chapters, to T. S. Eliot and Lionel Trilling, who defend them. In the 1970s and 1980s, the book, regarded by many as an implacable burden of racism, is perceived by others, notably because of the repeated use of the word nigger, as racist itself. In 2016, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was removed from a public school district in Virginia, along with the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, due to use of racial slurs. Responses to this include the publishing of The Hipster Huckleberry Finn which is an edition with the word nigger replaced with the word hipster. The book's description includes this statement “Thanks to Editor Richard Grayson, the adventures of Huckleberry Finn are now neither offensive nor uncool.”

Works CitedTop of Form

Bottom of Form

ALLEN, Nick, "To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn banned from schools in Virginia for racism". Telegraph 5 December 2016

BROWN, Robert B., One Hundred Years of Huck Finn, American Heritage, Volume 35, Issue 4

BURNETT, Brandon, Huckleberry Finn as a Picaresque American Satire, Association of Young Journalists And Writers, Universal Journal

COSCARELLI, Joe, Hipster Huckleberry Finn Solves Censorship Debate by Replacing N-Word With H-Word, The Village Voice

FAULKNER, William: Early Prose and Poetry, Ed. Little, Brown, Boston 1962

FISHKIN, Shelley Fisher, Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices New York: Oxford UP, 1993, Review by: Randall Knoper, in MELUS magazine, Vol. 20, No. 3, History and Memory (Autumn, 1995

PAINE Albert Bigelow, Mark Twain, a Biography, The University of Adelaide Library
University of Adelaide 2005

TWAIN, Mark, “Explanatory” to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

http://www.cmgww.com/historic/twain/about/quotes.htm