Adventures of (Reading) Huckleberry Finn

This wasn't my first experience with Huck Finn's narrative of his journey down the Mississippi river in search of freedom and adventure. My first encounter with Mark Twain's so-called "Great American Story" was near the end of my junior year of high school, right before a slew of AP tests, so I didn't allow myself the opportunity to really sit down and read it. Huck Finn is certainly not the type of book that can be skimmed or read quickly and have almost the same impact. You have to pay attention to what is happening in the story and how the characters develop for the story to hit home. Twain's constant use of heavy southern dialects can be unwieldy at times, but it certainly caused me to slow down immensely and on occasion I even had to pause to actually speak the lines to figure out what someone was trying to say. (Which I'm sure drew some odd looks from those sitting around me the few times I was reading the book in between classes, but oh well.)

Frustrating readers with complex dialect probably wasn't Twain's objective though--instead he intended to give an insight into the South for all of those people who weren't able to experience it first-hand. There were no televisions, no internet, and many people never left the area immediately surrounding their place of birth. Thousands in the North probably had no experience of slavery or what life in the South was like. Yet just two decades before the publishing of Huck Finn, America was ripped in twain (too good of a pun to pass up) by a horrendous civil war which was, at least partially, caused by the issue of slavery. Even though he grew up in Missouri and even "fought" for the Confederacy (albeit only for two weeks or so) during the Civil War, Twain obviously tries to paint slavery and those who own slaves as a blemish on human society. Many times Huck wrestles with reconciling his ideas of what makes a person good with being surrounded by slavery, which Huck eventually decides is immoral.

Although much of the controversy surrounding Huck Finn deals with slavery and racism, we cannot forget another major theme in the novel--adventure. I think just about every boy wants to go on adventures when he is 13, I know I did. However, parents (especially moms) always seem to ruin all of the fun in the name of safety. Navigating hundreds of miles down one of the largest and most heavily-trafficked rivers in the world, encountering unsavory personalities all the way, what could possibly happen? I suppose it's probably for the best Huck didn't have a mother around to prevent the story from becoming reality rather than a dream. Although now that I think about it, that would have been a wonderful ending--300 pages of Huck floating down the Mississippi living the life of a boy with no mother around to tell him to wash his hands and stop doubling the weight of his clothes with mud each day, only to end with Huck waking up an realizing the whole thing was merely a dream and he was still back in Widow Douglas' house, being "sivilized."

Not that the actual ending is much better. Aside from the resolution of Jim's quest for freedom, the rest of the story ends rather weakly in my opinion. Several chapters are consumed with the ludicrousness of Tom's plans, with little connection to the rest of the story except to remind us that Huck is a pragmatist at heart and not a dreamer like Tom. Eventually though, the plan is enacted and seemingly as a plot device, Tom's antics almost get himself killed so that Jim prove he is a human being in the eyes of the Phelps' before being informed of his freedom. Then the book wraps up with what became a running theme throughout: Huck decides to just keep on moving, west instead of south this time, to get away from any of the corruption and immorality that develops in human society. In a sense, Twain posits that continually moving is better than planting yourself somewhere and actually making a change in society.

I don't agree.