Huck’s Big Voice
Today, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn stands as a central document–some would say the central document–of American literature and as an acclaimed classic of world literature. Its impact on American writers who came after Twain has been enormous.
In his “Introduction” to the Random House Bantam Classics Edition, Justin Kaplan says: “By writing in Huck’s voice and from Huck’s point-of-view and raising the boy’s first-person, semi-literate regional vernacular to an astonishing level of naturalness, descriptive power, and lyricism, Mark Twain not only revolutionized the art of American storytelling but also enlarged its social range.”
* Do you have any reaction to this statement?
* Do you find reading the dialects of the narrator and characters difficult? If so, do you have strategies for understanding it?
* The story is told by a fourteen-year-old Huck, who admits to elaborate lies and fabrications. Can we trust him? Can we accept his version of things, or must we read between his lines?
Road Trip
(photo of the Mississippi River taken by Lisa A. Johnston– www.aeternus.com/photoblog/)
In some ways, Huck Finn offers us the “ultimate road trip”. I often think of Huck Finn as laying the groundwork for the many journey stories that follow in American literature. You’ll see this thread throughout this course–in obvious “road trip” stories like Kerouac’s On the Road, but also in less obvious journey stories, like Cheever’s story “The Swimmer”.
America is a big country and many Americans are wanderers, explorers, journeyers at heart. I find it striking that it’s usually men that get to be the wanderers, while women have to stay at home and make the homestead. (Katherine Anne Porter might bust open that generalization.)
I, too, am struck by the beautiful descriptions of the Mississippi River that come out of Huck’s mouth. Things like: “The river looked miles and miles across. The moon was so bright I could a counted the drift logs that went a slipping along, black and still hundreds of yards out from shore. Everything was dead quiet, and it looked late, and smelt late. You know what I mean–I don’t know the words to put it in.” (p. 240)
A Kids’ Book?
The first time I was required to read Huck Finn (long ago!), I groaned, thinking that it was a children’s book that had little to offer me. Then I had to teach it to high schoolers for a number of years in a row, and I found that with each reading it yielded something new–some new bit of humor from Twain, some new insight into human nature, some new bit of description of that part of the country.
It takes a while to get into the dialects…(you’ll find the same with Faulkner)…but then if you stick with it, read it aloud, get the feel of it, you get swept along.
Good luck!
(originally published 2/1/10)