Huck Finn

After almost thirty years, I have finally finished the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. What started as a rainy weekend project was never finished; my middle-school attention span could not hold out against the dialects, the constant stream of characters, etc. I gave up. My class did take a field trip to see the movie, but the reels were put in incorrectly, so everything was out of sequence!
I have read other Twain works over the years, and must admit that my distaste for heavy dialects in written form remains, but I did enjoy finishing Huckleberry’s story. I like the wit and humor in Mark Twain’s writing, and especially the deftness with which he manages to insert it into the story. Anytime a person boasts of his own intelligence while appearing to have none, I’m a fan.
Twain made clear his views on slavery and those who believed in it; by making those characters “dumber” than they thought they were, he hoped to make us see that their beliefs and actions are the same- not as smart as they appear to be. Huck spoke to and about Jim as an inferior, but we see many times that Huck did not know what he was talking about- grudgingly, Huck began to see that Jim was smarter than he thought. Huck was not clear on religion, because he was not given a clear vision of it, only “do this” and “don’t do that”; Twain used Huck’s adventures and subsequent spiritual growth on the river to show that religious training is not the only way to morals and values. I feel that Twain had much to say on the subject of anti-slavery, by giving Jim a big heart, and making him so fatherly to Huck- Huck would not have survived without him. But it seems that he was either too close to the time period or perhaps not far enough away to be completely objective. While I know his choice of words was completely within the context of the time period, I feel like he often treated Jim like a comedic character. I did not enjoy the last part of the story, as it felt like Huck had completely regressed into a minor character in another book; all of the steam and momentum that had built up was lost for me.
The river and the outdoors will always be a symbol of freedom; while not as bad as Jim being trapped by slavery, Huck felt confined when he was being “civilized”, and only when they were out and on the river did they feel free. At the end of the story, when Jim was finally free and he once again had a family to claim his own, Huck was searching out for wide spaces again, for freedom.