Huck Finn: The Original All-American

In my freshman English course on American Literature, I was truly devastated to learn that we would have only a single week in which to read and absorb the beautiful intricacies of one of my favorite authors, Mark Twain, and, in my opinion, the epitome of American Literature, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  This amazing piece of work is absolutely American in that it could never have come about in any country but the United States, with any influence other than the South, or under any better authorship than that of Mark Twain.  If asked to name an American book, I think that this would be the first one to come to my mind.

Twain, much as Dickinson and Whitman did with poetry, broke all the rules of prose.  He turned the world of American Literature on its head by letting his characters tell the story themselves, in their own words, with their own dialects, providing their own points of view, which were colored by their own values and morals, and all without explanation or remorse.  Twain resists the temptation to narrate or provide any excuses for what he writes, even though—if taken at face value—the tale can be extremely controversial.  He simply lets the story unfold by depicting it without embellishment, and lets the reader do the rest. 

And that depiction is truly incredible: every single thing that Huck encounters in his adventures along the river, he obediently describes with perfect accuracy, giving us a sense of Twain’s deep knowledge and understanding of his setting for this story.  Because of the ease with which Huck portrays his surroundings, we can easily see in our imaginations the two runaways rafting along the Mississippi, coming across small river outposts, meeting the various characters in a Southern “backwoods” society, and so on.  We are whisked away to another time and place, and completely immersed there in every detail: the language, the morals, the landscape, the philosophies, the relationships—everything is there, perfectly reconstructed, and we are lost within that world.

Although Huck faithfully describes the events and interactions in his journey, he actually understands very little of what is going on around him.  In another masterfully executed element of his writing, Twain manages to give us the most profound wisdom “out of the mouths of babes.”  He depends heavily on the use of irony to get his messages across to the reader.  When Huck speaks perfectly innocently and without comprehension about some of the most atrocious and unspeakable acts that Americans have ever committed, we are not meant to believe that Huck (or Twain himself) is a racist, a bigot, or a white supremacist!  Rather, it is intended to challenge the reader; to make us question what we take for granted or what we let slip by without taking issue, and to open our eyes as to whether this prejudice is really all in the past, or if it is still around us, going unnoticed, avoided, or ignored.