Episode 9: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Great American Novel

In this installment we look at another of the most iconic of GANs, Mark Twain's 1885 "bad boy" novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Written over an eight-year period, what began as a sequel to the mischievous "bad boy" book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) steepened into a caustic interrogation of racism in the United States. Twain's depiction of the relationship between the naive sprite Huck and the runaway slave Jim at once appeals to the American desire for harmonious race relations while probing blindspots in our national notions of equality. Twain employs several motifs associated with GANs---the journey, the river, the notion of the moral education--but at its core is a satirical impulse to question manners, pretentions, and aristocracies. Our discussion explores Twain's use of vernacular, the controversies surrounding both the prodigious use of the N-word and the final section of the novel (in which Tom and Huck play pranks on Jim instead of rescuing him from slavery), and what it means for our cultural notions of maturity that men want to "light out for the Territory" to avoid being "sivilized."