The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Review

Huckleberry Finn is Mark Twain’s sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and was published in 1884.

I found the writing of the book to be very difficult to get used to and this made it a time-consuming effort. The author notes at the beginning that several dialects from Southern America are used by different characters. The speech, which there is much of, is not spelt in a formal English way which made it difficult to read. I didn’t really enjoy the book that much as I found it difficult to read and didn’t like ending after Tom Sawyer was re-introduced towards the end.

The storyline does include many little adventures for Huckleberry, while he and Jim run away and are travelling on a raft down the Mississippi river. There are lots of characters introduced and Huckleberry travels around with the raft so that he can escape when necessary. I also feel like there was unnecessary stereotyping of Jim as being ignorant and not intelligent.

It is argued that the book was against slavery in the south of America at the time and the main character Huckleberry Finn appears to be conflicted on whether helping a slave to escape is the right thing to do.

The novel is controversial for it’s repeated use of the n-word, a pejorative slur. In context at the time of its publication the word was not seen as unacceptable within the society. Moreover, there have been discussions of censorship of the book, to edit out these words, which has been heavily criticised.

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Links:

Sparknotes Context to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/huckfinn/context.html

Video Sparknotes: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Summary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sBQg4fZ-ho

‘To kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn banned from schools in Virginia for racism’ article by The Telegraph

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/05/kill-mockingbird-huckleberry-finn-banned-schools-virginia-racism/