Huck Finn and race

One jarring aspect of listening to a reading of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the frequent use by Twain of the "n-word." Jim, Huck's companion on the raft, is a runaway slave. Huck is clearly deeply fond of Jim and admires him, but he regularly refers to him using the "n-word." This fact has led to this American classic being dropped from most high school reading lists, and it is rarely taught. This is a shame, in my view. Thus I was pleased to find through JSTOR (an on-line archive of academic articles) an article by Hugh H. Davis, a high-school English teacher, titled "On Teaching Huckleberry Finn," in the periodical Mark Twain Journal (Fall, 2016). He fully discusses all the issues raised by this work, especially the use of the "n-word," and how to effectively make use of these controversial issues in the classroom to inspire student engagement with the work. He makes use of a recent edition which has replaced the "n-word" with the word "slave." This raises issues of its own, of course, but these can also be raised in classroom discussion. Davis is probably in a minority - it's easier to just sidestep all these issues and not use Huck Finn. But he is gradually convincing colleagues to restore this classic to the classroom. Another article I found, The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn, by Jonathan Bennett (in Philosophy, 1974)  is also very interesting. It's pretty complicated to summarize here, but basically he agrees with me that this work explores in depth issues of morality and ethics. Huck himself, Bennett argues, believed that morality demanded that he respect the rights of Jim's owner,  and that therefore it was wrong for him to try to free Jim. But he intentionally decides to let his compassion for Jim to overrule his morality. He is resigned to see himself as a bad person who will probably go to hell because he tries to free Jim from slavery. We, of course, have the opposite view! In this way Twain raises very sophisticated ethical (and religious) issues. That is one feature of the work that makes it a classic.

Sterling Unabridged Classics Series