Why Is Huckleberry Finn Put Up At Auction And Sold

1267 Words6 Pages

Mark Twain, author of Huckleberry Finn, uses the n-word a total of two-hundred nineteen times in his book. Before diving into the subject matter, the book called Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is a novel set before the Civil War following the journey of a young boy named Huck. Huck struggles to escape his abusive father and takes to the Mississippi river alongside a black man named Jim. Jim, himself, struggles to gain freedom and escape enslavement. This novel would be considered a serious offense to an individual who has a closed mind about the matter at hand and has not fully understood when this book took place. Huckleberry Finn’s use of racial slurs makes the book seem ignorant and racist, even though the degrading of black people was …show more content…

His stance was that the man should be immediately sold at the auction, but it upset him even more to learn that he would need to wait at least six months to do so. Pap Finn could not accept that a black man was doing well for himself. This outburst provides an undeniable reality of Pap, in which he has proven to the audience that he is infested with disgusting jealousy for anyone who has a better life than him, as indicated with the professor along with Huck receiving an education. Pap just indulges in what we would call, “racial stupidity” and should not be considered a central part of the novel’s intended message of anti-slavery. In addition, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is both considered one of the greatest American classics and one of the most frequently banned and challenged books because of its usage of the n-word and racial …show more content…

There are movies and plays about slavery, but they are not seen as racist since they are reenactments of historical events in American history, this novel is the same way. Of course there are still those racist remarks made by ignorant characters like Pap Finn, but it is not the book’s main focus to be racist. Huckleberry Finn, who is the main character in this book and from whose perspective we follow throughout the entire book, can be seen going against the forceful social norms of society in the south several times, he even realized that he could be ridiculed and labeled as an abolitionist as a result of this. Examples of this include Huck refusing to study the bible and learn from it, him deciding not to turn Jim in as a runaway slave, and him teaming up with Tom Sawyer to rescue Jim from imprisonment. Because Huck refused to go along with the social norms of the pressuring south, he has shown us a rebellion against slavery. To give an instance when Huck refuses the social norm, Huck says “‘And for a starter, I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too’ ” (Twain