Few books in the American Literary genre have been as influential and as thoroughly debates as Mark Twains 1985 novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Just after being published the book was quickly banned in some libraries. To Twain’s critics, the novel is racist on the face of it, and for the most obvious reason, the racial slurs and the harsh depiction of Jim in the novel. I believe that this book is one of the greatest anti-racist books in America. In Huckleberry Finn Twain is not only not being a racist but he is trying to point out how stupid and wrong slavery is.
In Huck Finn every aspect of racism is shown through the people in the novel from Pap to Huck himself. In the beginning of the book you can see this from the Widow Douglas and Miss Watsons attempt to sivilize Huck to the end of the book when Tom Sawyer has a startling acclamation that Jim was already free. When a person reads this novel closely he or she might see that in many aspects Twain writes in a satiric sense. For instance Aunt Sally hears of a steamboat wreck and asks if anyone is hurt and then they answer no just a nigger.
Aunt sally continues on saying, Well, it’s lucky, because sometimes people do get hurt. In this sense Twain is using wordiness to get the point across that in the south if a black person died it would not bother them one bit. In chapter fifteen when Jim becomes very worried that he may have lost his friend expresses his concern to huck. This shows there is a connection, which has been made between huck and Jim. A connection not that of slavery and more important a relationship deeper than being a slave.
Another example would be how Pap is drunken, uneducated, and unemployed, representing the lowest class of white Southern society. Pap kidnaps Huck and holds him in the woods and then makes fun of Huck for being educated. And to Twain using the word nigger, he was just trying to give the book a more realistic view and to make it fit with the time frame it is placed. Although the evidence of Twains writing this book to be anti racism there is the side that thinks this book is extremely discriminatory and should be banned. Many people who have read this book have found it offensive and discrimantory.
The character of Miss Watson would be a prime example of a reason to ban this book an example but not a good one. The people who seek to ban this book are doing it on their own agendas. In taking this literary work out of classrooms it would be loosing the fight against racism. The fact that Twain wrote this novel twenty years after the abolition of slavery makes a good point to the supporters of banning the book. Then there is the obvious reason of the many uses of the word nigger in the novel. Racism is found in nearly every character including Huck.
