Critics of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Essay

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Critics of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn


In general, the mostly African-American
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He quotes Kafka as saying a book’s purpose is to “serve as the axe for the frozen sea within us” and to Lester, Huck Finn is the frozen sea, immoral and demeaning in its treatment of black history.
Lester is offended by the parallel that Twain draws between Huck’s imprisonment at the hands of an abusive father and the actual institution of slavery that binds Jim. By drawing this comparison, he argues that Twain is applying a veneer to obscure the horrors of slavery and therefore evading responsibility and remorse for the crime. The legal ownership of human beings is not in the same ballpark as child abuse and by placing them side-by-side, Twain shows that he doesn’t take slavery or black people seriously.

He goes on to argue that Jim’s childlike nature is not only offensive but also lacking in credibility. Are we to believe that a runaway slave wouldn’t know that freedom was as close as the banks of Illinois all along and that he would actually travel south into the heart of southern slavery? And is it likely that a white woman would’ve freed a slave suspected of killing a white child?

Even in his moments of heroism, Jim is an objectionable character. When he risks recapture in aiding the doctor tending to Tom’s gunshot wound, Jim is embodying the archetypal “good nigger” who lacks self-respect, dignity, and a sense of self separate from what whites want from him. He is merely a plaything that Tom and Huck use to inspire