**Yes, despite the fact that your passage doesn’t necessarily support this.
Christ, did you actually read the book? The primary conflict of the novel is resolved when Huck, in recognizing Jim’s humanity, decides he would rather go to hell than betray his friend. This is a shift in Huck’s thinking, dontcha think? Remember how he was planning to turn ol’ Jim in?
It being the principal dilemma he wrestles with, I’m not sure how you could miss this. But given your conclusions regarding Twain’s real beliefs (and that Huck is simply his proxy), I guess I’m not surprised. As best I can interpret it, your argument seems to be that if any character he wrote could be said to have a common belief with Twain, then that means it’s reasonable to assume that all characters speak for him. This is simply ridiculous.
I’ve read the damn thing more times than I can count. It’s one of my favorite books…and yes, I did read it before it was ever assigned. I was a power nerd in High school.
I’ve only been lurking in this thread until now, but I had to say that I read the book completely on my own when I was in the sixth grade and I absolutely loved it. I didn’t understand everything in it, but it was abundantly clear even to an 11 year old the thoughts and ideas that Mark Twain was trying to get across to his audience. I read it again on my own in the eighth grade and grew to appreciate it even more. Then, in the eleventh grade, it was assigned reading for my class and I enjoyed every minute of it.
Primary conflict of the novel? Please…
Jim tells Huck that he ran off, and asks Huck not to tell anybody. Huck’s reaction:
Huck then passes on the first opportunity to turn Jim in in chapter IX.
In the part about damnation, he says outright that he doesn’t a genuine intention to turn Jim in.
So at which point do you figure did Huck intend to turn Jim in?
If anything, this theme is about Huck’s realizing that his personal ethics trump external morality. Nothing to do with anyone’s humanity.
That may be, but that’s not what I’m saying.
The examples that I’ve given of the characters “speaking for Mark Twain” look somewhat forced in the context(E.g.,could the colonel come up with an aphorism worthy of, well, Mark Twain, on the spot?). Since the quote in question looks very good(for Twain’s times, anyway), it is reasonable to think that Mark Twain agreed with the statement - as he did with the other statements of similar nature in the book.
You may disagree, of course, but, really, you know as much about what Mark Twain thought on the topic as I do.
Because it’s an important part of American literature. If you’re going to teach a class on American literature you should include it as part of the curriculum.
It’s unlikely (and probably untrue) that it was ever in a school library, or on a reading list. Its presence in public libraries has been challenged, though, which is what gets it on the list.
~kfl, intrepid Ma-Fa extraordinaire
Also president of the Official Unofficial Guy Ritchie Fan Club
Sorry about the hijack, but I’m always amazed that Shel Silverstein isn’t banned more often (I’m not saying he should be, just that I’m surprised).
I know, I know, he wrote The Giving Tree, but he also wrote songs. Lots of them. Some were even hits (Cover of the Rolling Stone and A Boy Named Sue, for example.
But here are the titles of some other songs by him. And the lyrics pretty much match the titles, believe me.
Quaaludes Again
Get My Rocks Off
Lookin’ for Pussy
Penicillin Penny
Polly in a Porny
That is just a short list. He was a pretty raunchy guy. Drew cartoons for Playboy for ages, some of them pretty explicit (and funny, too).
This is a little self-serving as I contributed a few chapters to one of his books, but Nicolas Karolides has a number of books on censorship for a variety of reasons. If you want to know more on the subject, his work can be a good place to start.
HF is number one in American history for the sheer number of times people have tried to ban it. Other reasons include miscegenation, anti-feminiest for “invisibility” of female characters, pro-gay, and bad grammar.
Just about every work of great literature has been subject to challenge on the grounds that is offends someone. If you think that the other books in your lit classes didn’t single anyone out for humiliation, that may just be because you weren’t a member of the group which felt aggrieved. You might not consider, say, Macbeth, to be a work of literature which would single out anyone in the room and make them feel especially uncomfortable, but perhaps that’s just because you’re not a devout fundamentalist Christian who considers references to the occult (“Double, double, toil and trouble…”) to be dangerous, probably Satanic, and gravely harmful to one’s immortal soul. (I am of course assuming you’re not a fundamentalist Christian of that sort.) The inclusion of Macbeth in public school curricula has in fact been challenged on those grounds.
The point being, if you discard every work of literature which might possibly offend someone, no matter what general merit or literary greatness that work might possess, nor how reasonable the grievance may be, you won’t have anything to teach but mindless pap. (And that would offend me, so I guess literature class will just have to become Nap Time.)
It depicts the soul-wrenching horror of the slow degeneration of a human mind. Impressionable students might get the idea that it’s bad to have mental handicaps or go through the final stages of Alzheimer’s, thus they must not be allowed to read the book.
I just had to pitch in, as I am wont to do when I hear somebody expressing outrage over Huck Finn:
Shut the fuck up.
Sorry. That’s not what I really say, but I so frequently feel the urge to get that out of my system. I read Huck Finn as required reading in 9th grade. As the only African-American in a class full of white students. We didn’t feel the need for two weeks of preparation for the realities of racism, the teacher simply informed us that the word nigger was going to be used extensively. He then asked me if I would be offended by it. What did I say? “It’s a word.” And it is. I can’t believe people want to ban this book because Mark Twain had the audacity to write about the reality of that time period.
People against the reading of the book? You might want to read that italicized part again.
Reality of the period is right and I wonder what word the anti-Finns think that Twain should have used. Should Huck have spoken only of “African-Americans,” or “blacks” or “brothers?”
I think people forget that Twain was writing through the voice and the eyes of a child. A child who had been brainwashed from birth into certain assumptions and attitudes and who would have been taught no other word than the N word.
I suppose it’s a testimony to Mr. Clemons’ almost sublime use of irony in the book that people more than a century later are still getting whooshed by it.
how any intelligent person can read the entire book and conclude anything other than that it is a deeply anti-racist statement is beyond me.
That’s sig-worthy, Shade. May I use it?