Huckleberry Finn Dialectical Journal

Creative Title Mark Twain is known for his controversial writing, most well-known is his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The novel focuses on Huckleberry Finn, a young, uneducated boy about 13 years of age. Huck has misadventures with some unlikely allies such as; Jim, the previous slave of Huck’s guardian Miss Watson, the Duke and the Dauphin, sneaky thieves who attempt to rob the Wilks sisters, and the most important, Tom Sawyer, Huck’s role model. Huck looks up to Tom the entire novel and is continuously thinking of what Tom would do in the situation. Huck Finn’s character, the use of the river, and the language in the novel are aspects that make the use of the novel necessary in the curriculum. Furthermore, the naysayers argue

The word may be offensive to some, but it has historical concept that is needed to follow the story. The word is used many times, especially by Huck. For example Huck remarks, “It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger; but I done it, and I warn't ever sorry for it afterwards, neither. I didn't do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn't done that one if I'd a knowed it would make him feel that way. (15.49)” Huck declares this after Jim becomes upset over the trick Huck played on him. It displays how Huck was not insulting Jim but merely referring to him as it was socially correct in the 1840s. In the novel the language itself, the way things are written, is needed because the book is supposed to be written by Huck. A young, uneducated child would not speak with perfect grammar. Therefore the plot wouldn’t make sense to be written with correct grammar and vocabulary. In one instance Huck says, "Well, it's a blame ridicklous way, en I doan' want to hear no mo' 'bout it. Dey ain' no sense in it." "Looky here, Jim; does a cat talk like we do?" (14.39, 14.40) This excerpt is hard to read but if it were to be fixed would not fit the background at all. However, some critics still believe that, besides the facts, that the novel is still not applicable to a student's

The language, if changed, would not be consistent of that of an uneducated, teenage boy from the 30s. It is believed that publishers should just change the word to slave, but that would be incorrect since the two words have completely different meanings. The word is used even to kindly describe Jim when Huck states, “I liked the nigger for that; I tell you, gentlemen, a nigger like that is worth a thousand dollars—and kind treatment, too… and they slipped up on him and grabbed him and tied him before he knowed what he was about, and we never had no trouble. (42.15)” This fragment displays how African Americans were addressed, the replacing of the word would not be historically correct or definitionally correct. The controversy of the use of the N word is the most problematic of any