About fifteen years ago, when I was twenty-three, I decided to read the Great Books. And the list of Great Books that I followed was detailed in a guide called The New Lifetime Reading Plan, edited by Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major. Huckleberry Finn was one of these books, and I duly read it sometime in 2012.
With almost all of the books I read on my Great Books journey, I was able to understand why somebody might think this book had literary value. Huckleberry Finn was an exception. At the time, the book struck me as being unusually racist, even for a nineteenth-century classic. I was at the beginning of my self-education, so I didn’t know much about minstrel shows or blackface, but I did feel like the character of Jim, in Huckleberry Finn, was being played for laughs. He was a dimwit, he was afraid of ghosts, he couldn’t understand basic stories like Solomon ordering that the baby get divided in two. It just seemed like a cruel characterization.
Jim is only a secondary character in the book, but my understanding was that the book’s central concern was race in America. Indeed, if you took out the issue of slavery, the rest of the novel seemed to consist of nothing more than some comedic incidents along the river. This was a book I was supposedly reading precisely for its treatment of race, and that treatment was not just lacking—it was overtly offensive.
Fifteen years later, I was in the process of writing a review of Percival Everett’s latest book, James, which has become the rare book that is a smash hit with both the critics and a large audience of readers. Since James is a playful riff on Huckleberry Finn, it seemed a dereliction of duty not to revisit Twain’s novel, however reluctantly. Given the dim view I took of Huckleberry Finn the last time I read it—and given the anti-racist politics of the intervening years—I thought, “Maybe by now Huckleberry Finn’s star has faded. Perhaps it’s not even a classic anymore.”
I was wrong. I have a Substack that’s about the Great Books, and my subscribers often have opinions about nineteenth-century authors, so I posted on Substack Notes about Mark Twain, asking, in essence, “Do people actually care about Huckleberry Finn?” (I put it differently, but that was the gist). A lot of people responded, including people whose opinion I trust. They convinced me that this isn’t just a book that (some) kids are forced to read in school—it’s a book that adults can actually read for fun and have a strong emotional connection to.
As it happened, this time I adored Huck. It inspired me to re-read Tom Sawyer, too. And I couldn’t stop there. Twain’s liveliness and the fertility of his imagination were so exciting that I wanted more, so I also read his works of nonfiction: Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, and Innocents Abroad.
Previously, I’d read and enjoyed A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court, but now I also read and enjoyed two of his later novels: Pudd’nhead Wilson and The Prince and the Pauper. (On this read-through, the only one of Twain’s books that I didn’t enjoy was Tom Sawyer, Detective.)
So now I am very sold on Mark Twain as a whole. And my question becomes: what is there to say that’s really new? People love this man! I cannot write an article acting like I discovered Mark Twain. That would be silly.
I am reading Mark Twain precisely because there’s so much love for his work. That love is what inspired Everett’s James, and that love is why James received so much attention. Because I read that novel, I went and looked more into the man’s work, and an outpouring of voices convinced me to give him another chance. And … those voices were correct. That’s the article. That’s the story.
What’s great about Huckleberry Finn is exactly what’s most frustrating about it. Which is … what is this book? This novel is so strange! It starts out as a boy’s adventure story. But, unlike Tom Sawyer, which was narrated in a very avuncular third-person voice, this book is told in the first-person by Huckleberry Finn, who is an uneducated orphan.
The Widow Douglas and Judge Thatcher, two dignitaries in a Missouri town on the Mississippi river, have taken it upon themselves to take care of this boy and send him to school, make him wear clean clothes, etc.
Huck’s narration has an ingenuous tone that’s instantly appealing:
At first I hated the school, but by-and-by I got so I could stand it. Whenever I got uncommon tired I played hookey, and the hiding I got next day done me good and cheered me up. So the longer I went to school the easier it got to be. I was getting sort of used to the widow’s ways, too, and they warn’t so raspy on me.
But then the kid’s dad reappears, and he holds the kid captive in a cabin. The kid reputedly possesses some property, and the dad wants it. The kid has previously disposed of this property, but the dad doesn’t believe it.
Then the kid runs away from his dad, and he encounters an escaped slave, Jim, who belonged to the Widow Douglas. Jim has heard that Douglas was going to sell him down the river, into plantation slavery, which everyone knows is much worse than the slavery in this small town in Missouri. Down South, they’ll work you to death and kill you. I don’t remember if this difference is fully explained in the book, but it’s something most readers of Huckleberry Finn understand.
Anyway, then Jim and Huck float down the Mississippi on a raft and have some adventures. The kid has no plans, really. He’s fine with whatever happens. Jim has some desire to be free, but I would not say this desire is a particular driver of the plot. Mostly it’s just episodes. A lot of different episodes.
Fifteen years ago, I was put off by how Jim was characterized. I cannot explain to you how much Jim doesn’t quite work as a character! He’s just not right. He doesn’t have the same life that other characters have.
Jim is a dimwit, and he’s ignorant. But a lot of Huckleberry Finn’s characters are stupid and/or ignorant. Mostly, the problem is that Jim’s portrayal seems to traffic in a certain vein of racist humor derived from minstrel shows. At one point, he describes losing his money in a bank that’s been started by another slave:
You know dat one-laigged nigger dat b’longs to old Misto Bradish? Well, he sot up a bank, en say anybody dat put in a dollar would git fo’ dollars mo’ at de en’ er de year.
And the joke is … how can slaves start a bank? They’re slaves! That’s the humor: slaves thinking they can do what regular, non-enslaved people do. And there’s a fair amount of stuff like that in the first quarter of the book: episodes where Jim’s stupidity is meant to be a source of humor.
That’s the whole reason Percival Everett decided to reimagine the character of Jim for his novel James. It’s because Everett loves Huckleberry Finn, but he understood that Jim seems noticeably less human than other elements of the book. In an interview with PBS, Everett said, “Jim, this character, who’s become iconic in our literary landscape, has never had a chance to speak.”
Ralph Ellison had a similar reaction. He loved the novel, but he did not believe in Jim. In his 1958 essay “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” Ellison wrote:
I knew the trickster Ulysses just as early as I knew the wily rabbit of Negro American lore, and I could easily imagine myself a pint-sized Ulysses but hardly a rabbit, no matter how human and resourceful or Negro. And a little later I could imagine myself as Huck Finn (I so nicknamed my brother), but not, though I racially identified with him, as Nigger Jim, who struck me as a white man’s inadequate portrait of a slave.
Jim’s characterization does improve, however, about a fourth of the way into the book. What happens is that Huck has been missing, and when Huck comes back, he decides to play a practical joke. He climbs onto the boat and makes believe that Jim just fell asleep and dreamed that Huck was missing. And when Jim realizes that Huck has been playing a trick on him, he says:
When I got all wore out wid work, en wid de callin’ for you, en went to sleep, my heart wuz mos’ broke bekase you wuz los’, en I didn’ k’yer no mo’ what become er me en de raf’. En when I wake up en fine you back agin’, all safe en soun’, de tears come en I could a got down on my knees en kiss’ yo’ foot I’s so thankful. En all you wuz thinkin ’bout wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie.
Huck feels bad and decides not to play tricks on Jim anymore. And after that, Jim’s being a dimwit stops being such a big element of the book. For a while, he’s a bit more human, and even Huck admits that Jim has a certain level of sagacity. For instance, at one point the raft gets wrecked, and Jim later explains he was certain he was dead, because either he’d get rescued and the rescuers would sell him South, or he wouldn’t get rescued, and he’d drown. And Huck allows:
Well, he was right; he was most always right; he had an uncommon level head, for a nigger.
But these moments are rather infrequent. It’s around this point that Jim stops being a huge part of the book. In the second half, he disappears as an active part of the plot (rather than a mere device).
The impression given by the text is that Twain knew he had to stop making fun of Jim, but he didn’t really know what else to do with him.
Huckleberry Finn is entertaining. It has an episodic narrative, and the individual episodes are usually quite funny and inventive—often there are so many double-crossings and switch-ups that even Huck gets confused. For instance, at one point he pretends to be a girl in order to get help in a village, and a woman tells him that he’s doing a terrible job of pretending to be a girl. But then he tells her another story, about how he’s an escaped apprentice who had a bad master. And she feels kinda proud of herself for seeing through the first ruse, so she starts giving him pointers on how to better pretend to be a girl:
… when you throw at a rat or anything, hitch yourself up a tip-toe, and fetch your hand up over your head as awkard as you can, and miss your rat about six or seven foot. Throw stiff-armed from the shoulder, like there was a pivot there for it to turn on—like a girl; not from the wrist and elbow, with your arm out to one side, like a boy. And mind you, when a girl tries to catch anything in her lap, she throws her knees apart; she don’t clap them together, the way you did when you catched the lump of lead…. [Now] if you get into trouble you send word to Mrs. Judith Loftus, which is me, and I’ll do what I can to get you out of it.
That’s one of the more famous episodes. But I found even the less famous ones to be diverting. For instance, at one point Huck witnesses one man shoot another one in this town. And then the people of that town get together and try to lynch the killer. And the killer calls them out:
The idea of you lynching anybody! It’s amusing. The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a man! Because you’re brave enough to tar and feather poor friendless cast-out women that come along here, did that make you think you had grit enough to lay your hands on a man? Why, a man’s safe in the hands of ten thousand of your kind–as long as it’s daytime and you’re not behind him.
It’s a long speech. And it’s great. The man faces down this mob who want to lynch him, and he says: I have a gun and I will shoot some of you before you get me. And, you are cowards and don’t want to die. So … go home.
You just never know what’s going to happen in Huckleberry Finn. I think some critics feel the way I did fifteen years ago. They think, when does this become literature? When does the Great Books stuff happen? They really try to reduce the book to some grand statement about race, or about freedom vs. civilization. And that’s all true, yes, but … you can’t just read for that. You need to enjoy the profusion of voices, profusion of incidents and characters and life in this book itself.
“Jim, this character, who’s become iconic in our literary landscape, has never had a chance to speak.”
Many critics, for instance, aren’t particularly fond of the last act of the book, in which Jim gets captured and people keep trying to figure out who Jim belongs to and to claim some kind of reward for him. And it turns out that the people who’ve captured him are cousins of Tom Sawyer, which means Tom Sawyer re-enters the story. And Huck convinces Tom to try and free Jim. But what’s funny is that Tom really isn’t like Huck! Tom has a home. He goes to school. He’s a scamp and a dreamer, but he has an ordinary, settled life to rebel against—Huck doesn’t.
And that juxtaposition between the two of them becomes very apparent in the last act. Huck wants to wait until the guard is asleep, steal the key, then get Jim and take him to a canoe. Tom says no, no, that won’t do, for various reasons.
As Huck puts it:
I knowed mighty well that whenever [Tom] got his plan ready it wouldn’t have none of them objections to it…. And it didn’t. He told me what it was, and I see in a minute it was worth fifteen of mine, for style, and would make Jim just as free a man as mine would, and maybe get us all killed besides.
Tom then creates all these far-fetched high-adventure schemes that’re like something out of The Count of Monte Cristo. He also enlists poor Jim into these schemes, and makes the hapless guy try to write in secret ciphers and eat rats and stuff.
Everyone is at Tom’s mercy, and nothing can happen until and unless he wants it to happen. I personally found it to be pretty funny, because I’d read Tom Sawyer, and to me these schemes encapsulated the difference in aims and worldview between the two books, and between Tom and Huck as people.
I had thought about dressing up this essay in some weighty clothing about the nature of the classics. There are essays by Saint-Beuve, Coetzee, Eliot, and Kermode (usually these essays are entitled “What is a classic?”) that you can trot out and move across the stage at will. But to what end? Twain is alive and well. I posted about him online, daring to say that perhaps Huckleberry Finn is not a classic anymore, and seventy-one people responded. Most of them love him.
A good portion of them (thirty-seven) were assigned the book in school. But many of the rest had read it for pleasure. Even many who were assigned the book in school had re-read it multiple times.
At some point, I thought, “Am I just so popular? Will people opine about anything I ask?”
A few weeks later, I asked about Ron Chernow (the biographer) and got no responses! Similarly, I just asked if anyone had read The Last of the Mohicans and only got one or two responses. I also asked about these Solvej Balle books from Denmark that are so hyped lately, and I got two or three responses. But mention Twain and seventy-one people will come out and attest how much they love him (responses were overwhelmingly positive, a few people were indifferent). The guy is good. He’s taught in school, and he’s read for pleasure. Huckleberry Finn remains a classic by any possible definition.
I think some critics are like I was fifteen years ago. They think, when does this become literature?
Personally, I cannot imagine standing up in front of a class and telling them that Twain’s portrayal of Jim is great literature. I do think there’s a failure of imagination and of empathy on Twain’s part—he’s not really able to invest Jim with the same life with which he invests his other characters. And it does harm the book.
He’s not able to perform the alchemy that Shakespeare did with Shylock or with Caliban, where he invests these characters with so much life that you start to believe in them and root for them. Prospero describes how Caliban tried to rape Miranda, but you’re still on the beast’s side, listening to him spit the words: O ho, O ho! would’t had been done! / Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else / This isle with Calibans. He’s angry and brutish, but still feels very true.
With Jim, that sense of truth simply isn’t there.
But, luckily, I am not a teacher! And I am not a professor. I am not even a weighty, important person who comes up with lists of Great Books. I am merely a person who was presented a list and has made a bit of a career out of opining about that particular list. My belief is that if a book is on a list of Great Books, we ought to assume that it has a lot to offer. And with Huckleberry Finn, although it was once hard for me to see the merit in this book, I’ve come to think that the book offers considerable energy and enjoyment, and it remains highly worth reading.
My initial intuition (“This book is much more racist than most of these other Great Books”) was well-merited, but I also have a deeper appreciation now for Twain’s honesty. Twain actually wrote about non-white people. Most nineteenth-century authors didn’t. I’ve now read a number of Twain’s travelogues (I particularly enjoyed Roughing It and Innocents Abroad), and they have numerous passages in which he calls various non-white people uncivilized. Most famously, he says (about all Native Americans) that they’re essentially uncivilized and dirty and savage, and impossible to sympathize with if you’ve actually met one:
They deserve pity, poor creatures; and they can have mine at this distance. Nearer by, they never get anybody’s.
Not all non-white people come in for opprobrium. The same book has a long, admiring passage about Chinese people. Essentially, the more clean and civilized you seem, the more praise you get from Twain (in his nonfiction). It’s actually somewhat striking how his values, as a nonfiction writer, are a bit inverted from Huck’s values in Huckleberry Finn. In his nonfiction and in his other novels, Twain is much more unstinting in his praise of progress and innovation than he is in Huckleberry Finn. That’s one of the reasons this book is his best. The process of laundering his opinions through the situation of the story (rather than stating them directly in the narration, as he does in other books) has a softening effect.
Even in his nonfiction, I admire the honesty. What I like about Twain is that he was actually willing to think about people from other races. That’s not something that, say, Willa Cather or Henry James were necessarily willing to do. Their work comes off as less racist only because other races are absent.
Yes, many nineteenth-century writers wrote about other races in ways that seem less racist than Twain did. I’m reading The Last of the Mohicans now, and the portrayal of the Indians just seems a lot more sensitive; they’re not played for laughs—they seem much more human than Jim. But … so what? I do not think Twain was able to write Jim differently than he did. He certainly tried at some point to invest him with more humanity, but he just couldn’t. You can read that struggle in the book; it’s one of the book’s major themes, and it’s exactly why we read it today. Huck Finn, the character, has been taught to see Jim as less than human, just a piece of property, and he knows that’s wrong, but he’s not able to articulate anything different—all he knows is that Jim is his friend.
I still think, however, that Jim is quite troubling. It makes the book hard to recommend. The portrayal of Jim remains ham-fisted and unkind. The closest analogue seems, to me, the portrayal of the cruel, greedy Fagin in Oliver Twist. Fagin is first introduced as “a very old shrivelled Jew whose villainous looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted old hair,” and the subsequent text refers over two hundred times to him as “the Jew.” There’s not really much complexity to it. Dickens was just trafficking in images common to his time, and when a Jewish reader wrote to him saying she was offended, he was horrified, and later on tried to atone by writing a different Jewish character, in Our Mutual Friend, who’s not at all greedy and who’s forced by an evil Christian to be a moneylender.
But the point is, we’ve responded collectively by just ignoring Oliver Twist, or at least ignoring the problems with the characterization of Fagin. Schools assign Great Expectations instead. And if someone were to ask me about the best Dickens novels, Oliver Twist would not be in my top eight.
With Twain, it’s different. Huckleberry Finn is the book, and Jim is at the core of the novel. I’m personally not offended, but then … I’m not Black! If someone wanted to be offended, they definitely could be. It seems like if you recommend Huckleberry Finn to people, you’re asking for trouble you won’t necessarily get from recommending, say, The Scarlet Letter. And yet: people love this book, and now I kinda love it too. And I think this article constitutes at least some sort of recommendation. So maybe that’s how it works. Maybe that’s exactly why Huckleberry Finn remains a classic. In the end, it’s hard to truly hate.