An Unflinching Look at Life: A Review of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Karly Noelle Abreu White
With the school year starting or drawing close, let’s examine one of the most popular books assigned to high school students. Consistently on lists of “most challenged” books in the United States and elsewhere, Mark Twain’s enduring classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remains as relevant today as it was when it was first written. Centered around the title character Huckleberry “Huck” Finn, the story opens on Huck, who was recently taken in by the prim Widow Douglas, who is kind and educated, and working hard to civilize the adventurous rapscallion. Huck is coming off the adventures he shared with his best friend Tom Sawyer in his own book, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which left him with a windfall of money, held in trust. Lured by the promise of his boy’s fortune, his ne’er-do-well father, Pap, comes sniffing around, demanding the boy’s money, and legal custody of him so he can access that money.
Despite the Widow’s best efforts, Pap eventually kidnaps his son, locking him in his cabin during the day and beating him in a drunken stupor at night. Huck fakes his death and escapes to Jackson’s Island, where he meets Jim, an escaped slave. Knowing that it won’t be long until Pap or Jim’s slave owner finds them, they set off down the Mississippi River, where they will encounter the charlatans who call themselves Duke and the Dauphin, rival southern aristocrats, and yet another harebrained plan by Tom Sawyer as each of them searches for freedom in a world that values neither the poor child nor the Black man.
While the tone is light and features Mark Twain’s trademark wit, it’s not hard to see why the book is, even today, still both reviled and adored in equal measure. The themes of racism and the meaning of equality are front and center in the character of Jim, a noble escaped slave who nevertheless is consistently called a “n*gger” by both the white people around him and by the text, and over whom our hero internally debates with himself about the morality of freeing. Jim himself is fairly flat and one-dimensional, playing into the “noble savage” trope in some ways, though his genuine concern and care for Huck through their adventures is humanizing.
While ink is still spilled even today over whether the book is a racist or antiracist text, Twain makes it clear that Jim’s situation is one in which he is powerless over the machinations of the white people around him, and he draws clear parallels between Jim’s situation as a Black man in the South and Huck’s as a child of poverty and little education.
The book, riddled with odd spelling choices courtesy of Huck’s lack of “sivilizaion,” presents a fascinating commentary on class differences as well as educational injustice. Huck stands in sharp contrast to his pal Tom, who is able to cause a ruckus just for the fun of it, forcing everyone around him to keep up an elaborate (and excruciating to read) charade toward the end of the book just for his own entertainment. Huck, who does not come from the life of privilege that Tom enjoys, goes along with his charade in much the same way he and Jim are forced to do earlier in the text for the Duke and Dauphin, shysters who seize their raft, make them party to their cons, and eventually try to sell Jim before being ratted out themselves. In these situations, the role of both Huck and Jim is clear: in this world, the wealthy and the white make the rules, and they are powerless to prevent them, even at great personal cost.
Huck may talk tough, but he is ultimately treated as inferior to the well-educated and upper class people he comes across, and while he labors over whether Jim is property or not, personally, he is himself claimed ownership over by the various adults and even friends in his life. When Tom is around, Huck is reduced to a side character in his own story, and while everything works out for him in the end, it’s hard not to see just how troubling Huck’s circumstances are in these moments in the story.
Despite being labeled as an adventure and featuring plenty of hijinx, humor, and witticisms, Huck Finn is a fairly dark story, taking place in a reconstruction South that has left the poor, the low class, and the Black behind. There is abuse, slavery, murder, and death. There is bloodshed and shootouts, matronly slave holders and matronly widows hoping to improve ruffians, there are con men taking advantage of young women, thieves with no regard for human life, and there are kids who use the poor and the enslaved as playthings in their own grand game. Mark Twain pulls no punches, and his commentary is clear: in the land of the free, even what should be the joy of boyhood isn’t without darkness and inequality.
But the fun thing is, those themes are always there, even if you’re a ten-year-old just reading the book for the first time, enchanted with Huck and Jim’s life on the river and the clever wordplay and spiteful, roguish attitude of Huck. It’s a true “all ages” story, one that looks at life unflinchingly, but still manages a wink and a nod, still captures the carelessness, delight, and occasional cruelty of childhood, in all of its muddiness.
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Karly Noelle Abreu White is an author, poet, copywriter, and editor. Her work has been featured in Writers Resist, Lines of Velocity, Untangled, Nothing Held Back, and Pieces of Me. She holds a bachelors in English literature from Biola University and spends her time writing about faith, justice, literature, equality, education, and pop culture. She has a husband, two children, a fussy cat, and lives in Southern California, where she can usually be found sipping tea.
