Summary: A quest style adventure with a bit of satire.
Last year I read James by Percival Everett. This year my book group chose to read it and I decided that I needed to read Huck Finn as well. I have not previously read Huck Finn, and while a number of the group had read Huck Finn in school, no one had read it recently when we started. (Although two others read it as we read James, just like I did.)
I HATED Huck Finn. I like the book James. But I honestly can’t figure out why so many people love Huck Finn. Maybe it is simply that it was a young adult adventure book when that was fairly new and so people have fond memories of books that they read as children. I have reread a number of books as an adult that I remember fondly from my childhood. Some of them still work, but some do not.
Tom Sawyer is an awful character. I can’t read the end of Huck Finn with Tom Sawyer’s foolishness without wanting to throw the book across the room. There is no sense of Tom having thought for Jim as a person. While at times Huck has naive wisdom and plays like he knows the Duke and King were bad men, his continued desire to save them or go back to them did not make any sense. Huck at times treats Jim as human, but much of the time Jim is a pet.
I know that people suggest that this is satire, but that doesn’t do it for me. I can tell that Mark Twain is trying to write satire. But while the ridiculousness of the “escape plan” at the end can only be read as satire, it is just cruelty. The N word is used 219 times by several web articles I found. That is more than once every two pages.
I did understand James more because I read Huck Finn. There was more deviations from the Huck Finn story line than I assumed when I read James the first time. But honestly I think I like James less after reading Huck Finn than I did before I read Huck Finn.
I alternated between reading the text and listening to an audiobook narrated by Elijah Wood. The audio was well produced, but the audio just confirms that this is not a book that should be read by kids. It is not that kids can’t hear the N word in any book. But that Huck Finn whitewashes slavery and encourages dehumanization and uses humor to cover up the story. We already have problems telling the real history of slavery and reconstruction in United States history, we do not need to perpetuate fictionalized white washing as to confuse the history.
If I had not been reading James with a book club and wanting to have the comparison between Huck Finn and James I would not have finished the book. Even so I had to force myself to finish it.