Reviews for Huckleberry Finn

The average rating for Huckleberry Finn based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-02-27 00:00:00 Gary Mazin After reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I realized that I had absolutely nothing to say about it. And yet here, as you see, I have elected to say it anyway, and at great length. Reading this novel now, at the age of mumble-mumble, is a bit like arriving at the circus after the tents have been packed, the bearded lady has been depilated, and the funnel cake trailers have been hitched to pick-up trucks and captained, like a formidable vending armada, toward the auburn sunset. All the fun has already been used up, and I'm left behind circumnavigating the islands of elephant dung and getting drunk on Robitussin®. Same story, different day. How exactly did I make it through eight total years of high school and undergraduate studies in English without having read any Mark Twain but a brief (and forgotten) excerpt from Life on the Mississippi? Isn't this illegal by now? I mean, isn't there a clause in the Patriot Act... an eleventh commandment... a dictate from Xenu? Isn't Huckleberry Finn, like Romeo and Juliet and To Kill a Mockingbird, now an unavoidable teenage road bump between rainbow parties and huffing spray paint? Isn't it the role of tedious classic literature to add color and texture to the pettiness of an adolescence circumscribed by status updates, muff shaving, and shooting each other? Or am I old-fashioned? Let's face it. In the greater social consciousness, there are two stars of this book: (1) the word 'nigger' and (2) the Sherwood Schwartz-style ending in which Tom Sawyer reappears and makes even the most casual reader wonder whether he might not be retarded. Huckleberry Finn, for all his white trash pedigree, is actually a pretty smart kid -- the kind of dirty-faced boy you see, in his younger years, in a shopping cart at Wal-Mart, being barked at by a monstrously obese mother in wedgied sweatpants and a stalagmite of a father who sweats tobacco juice and thinks the word 'coloreds' is too P.C. Orbiting the cart, filled with generic cigarette cartons, tabloids, and canned meats, are a half-dozen kids, glazed with spittle and howling like Helen Keller over the water pump, but your eyes return to the small, sad boy sitting in the cart. His gaze, imploring, suggestive of a caged intellect, breaks your heart, so you turn and comparison-shop for chewing gum or breath mints. He is condemned to a very dim horizon, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it, so you might as well buy some Altoids and forget about it... That boy is the spiritual descendant of Huckleberry Finn. The 'nigger' controversy -- is there still one? -- is terribly inconsequential. It almost seems too obvious to point out that this is (a) firstly a 'period novel,' meaning it that occurs at a very specific historical moment at a specific location and (b) secondly a first-person narrative, which is therefore saddled with the language, perspective, and nascent ideologies of its narrator. Should we expect a mostly uneducated, abused adolescent son of a racist alcoholic who is living in the South before the Civil War to have a respectful, intellectually-enlightened perspective toward black people? Should the character of Huck Finn, in other words, be ahistorical, anachronistic? Certainly not, if we expect any semblance of honesty from our national literature. Far more troubling to many critics is the ending of Huckleberry Finn, when -- by a freakishly literary coincidence -- Huck Finn is mistaken for Tom Sawyer by Tom's relatives, who happen to be holding Jim (the slave on the run) in hopes of collecting a reward from his owners. There are all sorts of contrivances in this scenario -- the likes of which haven't been seen since the golden age of Three's Company -- which ends with Tom arriving and devising a ridiculously elaborate scheme for rescuing Jim. All in all, the ending didn't bother me as much as it bothered some essayists I've read. That is, it didn't strike me as especially conspicuous in a novel which relies a great deal on narrative implausibility and coincidence. Sure, Tom Sawyer is something of an idiot, as we discover, but in a novel that includes faked deaths and absurd con jobs, his idiocy seems well-placed. In the end, I suppose the greatest thing I can say about this novel is that it left me wondering what happened to Huck Finn. Would his intellect and compassion escape from his circumstances or would he become yet another bigoted, abusive father squiring another brood of dirty, doomed children around a fluorescently-lit Wal-Mart?

Review # 2 was written on 2008-06-13 00:00:00 Charles Casey This is a rant. I found Huckleberry Finn on my bookshelf had been changed to Huckleberry Finn Robotic Edition. Some very pc "authors" and "editors" took it upon themselves to change the N word to 'robot'. They then rewrote the book to take away any mention of humans and to 'roboticise' words such as 'eye' which becomes something like 'optical device'. The illustrations have also been changed. I have no problem with this, but I do have two major issues with this edition. The first problem is with the librarians who think think this is close enough to the original that it should be combined and therefore share the ratings of Mark Twain's original book. There was a long discussion in the librarian thread where some librarians thought it was essentially the same book, perhaps most. So it was combined and the edition of the book I read was changed to that one. I DID NOT read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Robotic Edition. This robot edition was a Kindle book. Think about it and the danger of these 'authors'. If this is acceptable and it is to a lot of the librarians, why not politically correct Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Agatha Christie (oh she's been done already. It was 10 Little N words, then 10 Little Indians, now it's Then there were 10, lol). Sooner or later print books will be in used bookshops, research libraries and old people's houses. They will become not books to be read but collector's items. For reading it will be the ebook where changes can be easily and instantaneously made. And if politically-correcting everything becomes Amazon policy then the whole publishing world will follow and your children will never know the original story that Mark Twain wrote. They will never understand how N word people were treated and that is my second issue with this pc book. They will never know that Jim, a grown man would not normally be expected to hang out with 13 year old boys, kowtowed to Tom and Huckleberry not just because they all liked each other, but because he was not free, he was a slave, property, and was subject to the usual treatment of property. He could be ordered to do anything no matter how stupid or harmful, he could be sold or mistreated not even for punishment but just because he had no human rights whatsoever. Changing N people to robots negates all this. Yes it is more politically acceptable to Whites but how would a Black person feel having their history taken away from them? This is not pc as much as sanitising history and is wrong on every level. And it was done by the authors to make it easier for White teachers to teach this important book (is it important if it is about robots though?) without engendering awkward discussions about race, slavery, why some people have rights and others are property which has also meant the book is on many 'banned' school lists. Do you find this acceptable? A lot of GR librarians don't see a damn thing wrong with it. But I do. See Fahrenheit 451 edited 27 Jan 2018