The word “nigger” in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, connects the story of a young boy and his journey through the south with a racist southern society that has a negative effect upon the people who call it home. To use the word “nigger” as a reference to the black race, means they have submitted to the mindset of the south. The effect of the racist ideals are so massive that even slaves raised in the South believe they are lesser than the white race. The word “Nigger” negatively influences the everyday life of the Antebellum south, the church, and the mindset of Huck Finn, a boy fighting the conformist life forced upon him.
Twain uses the word “nigger” throughout his novel to convey the dehumanizing views and the actions of a racist society that the slaves
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Just observing that a character must be named “Nigger Jim” in order to ensure that readers know that he is not equal to the normal characters, ensures that “nigger” was a word associated with dehumanizing views. When Jim recounts his family and how he wants to steal them back from their owner, Huck realizes that the southern saying “give a nigger an itch and he’ll take in ell” begins to occur in Jim’s life after Jim becomes exposed to freedom (Twain 75). This statement refers to the situation in which the “nigger” acquires an itch, or exposed to real human life, which causes them to “take in ell” and make it their goal to acquire that rights which are rightfully theirs, but robbed from the black people by the white race (75). Jim’s desire to gain his family back causes an uneasy feeling in Huck’s body. Huck being “frozen to hear” that Jim wants to save his own children further supports the claim that white people do not find “niggers” as humans. For a “nigger” to talk like a white man when “he was about free”