РефератыИностранный языкHuHuckleberry Finn Essay Research Paper Huckleberry FinnIn

Huckleberry Finn Essay Research Paper Huckleberry FinnIn

Huckleberry Finn Essay, Research Paper


Huckleberry Finn


In his latest story, Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade), by Mark Twain, Mr. Clemens has


made a very


distinct literary advance over Tom Sawyer, as an interpreter of human nature and a contributor to our stock


of


original pictures of American life. Still adhering to his plan of narrating the adventures of boys, with a


primeval


and Robin Hood freshness, he has broadened his canvas and given us a picture of a people, of a


geographical region, of a life that is new in the world. The scene of his romance is the Mississippi river.


Mr.


Clemens has written of this river before specifically, but he has not before presented it to the imagination so


distinctly nor so powerfully. Huck Finn’s voyage down the Mississippi with the run away nigger Jim, and


with


occasionally other companions, is an adventure fascinating in itself as any of the classic outlaw stories, but


in


order that the reader may know what the author has done for him, let him notice the impression left on his


mind


of this lawless, mysterious, wonderful Mississippi, when he has closed the book. But it is not alone the


river that


is indelibly impressed upon the mind, the life that went up and down it and went on along its banks are


projected with extraordinary power. Incidentally, and with a true artistic instinct, the villages, the cabins,


the


people of this river become startlingly real. The beauty of this is that it is apparently done without effort.


Huck


floating down the river happens to see these things and to encounter the people and the characters that


made


the river famous forty years ago–that is all. They do not have the air of being invented, but of being found.


And


the dialects of the people, white and black–what a study are they; and yet nobody talks for the sake of


exhibiting a dialect. It is not necessary to believe the surprising adventures that Huck engages in, but no


one


will have a moment’s doubt o

f the reality of the country and the people he meets.


Another thing to be marked in the story is its dramatic power. Take the story of the Southern Vendetta–a


marvelous piece of work in a purely literary point of view–and the episode of the duke and the king, with


its


pictures of Mississippi communities, both of which our readers probably saw in the Century magazine.


They


are equaled in dramatic force by nothing recently in literature.


We are not in this notice telling the story or quoting from a book that nearly everybody is sure to read, but


it is


proper to say that Mr. Clemens strikes in a very amusing way certain psychological problems. What, for


instance, in the case of Huck, the son of the town drunkard, perverted from the time of his birth, is


conscience,


and how does it work? Most amusing is the struggle Huck has with his conscience in regard to slavery. His


conscience tells him, the way it has been instructed, that to help the runaway, nigger Jim to escape–to aid


in


stealing the property of Miss Watson, who has never injured him, is an enormous offense that will no doubt


carry him to the bad place; but his affection for Jim finally induces him to violate his conscience and risk


eternal


punishment in helping Jim to escape. The whole study of Huck’s moral nature is as serious as it is amusing,


his


confusion of wrong as right and his abnormal mendacity, traceable to his training from infancy, is a


singular


contribution to the investigation of human nature.


These contradictions, however, do not interfere with the fun of the story, which has all the comicality, all


the odd


way of looking at life, all the whimsical turns of thought and expression that have given the author his wide


fame


and made him sui generis. The story is so interesting so full of life and dramatic force, that the reader will


be


carried along irresistibly, and the time he loses in laughing he will make up in diligence to hurry along and


find


out how things come out.

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