Review of (another) American Classic, Mateo Hernandez

 Review of (another) American Classic, Mateo Hernandez

            I began The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn near the end of my summer break after I reached an unbearable amount of boredom. I asked my mom to pick up some classic novels while she was at the library as I found I enjoyed previous ones like Of Mice and Men.

            The story of Huckleberry Finn takes place in the mid-1830s/40s before the Civil War and follows a boy known as Huckleberry Finn, a young teenager who after enduring much abuse from his father, fakes his own death and runs away from his home. After a few days he encounters a runaway slave named Jim who he befriends and with whom he travels down the Mississippi River. The duo has many encounters on their travels ranging from hitchhiking con artists to a shootout between two rival families. At the end of the book Jim is freed and Huck continues his voyage to the West.

            I honestly enjoyed this book a lot. It is written by author Mark Twain who also wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (which I didn’t realize was written first; I started with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn but I hope to go back and read Tom Sawyer at some point) and is well-known as a famous American author. I liked that this book kept me thinking about what would happen next with all the unbelievable things that Huck and Jim encountered on their odyssey, which made it very engaging to me. I also enjoyed how this novel depicted daily life during the pre-Civil war era; I felt like I was right there with Huck and Jim on their raft. While I love the adventures that Huck experienced and recognize that this might not be how the average boy lived, I found it interesting how Twain depicted life during that time as tough for the average man to provide for his family, and how he intertwined complex issues of justice and race throughout the novel.

            Of course, there were some things I found challenging about this book. My main problem with the novel was the written dialect. Twain wrote the book trying to depict how African Americans spoke during the time, which was the main reason I had a hard time getting through the novel if the first place. For example, Jim states “Chickens knows when its gwyne rain, en so do de birds, chile," (Twain 56). I had a really hard time translating phrases like this. But after I read over it a few times I realized that Jim was trying to tell Huck that he knew it was about to rain because he was listening to nature. And while the dialect can be tricky to comprehend sometimes, that’s not always a bad thing. This kind of dialect helps elevate the level of detail that Twain incorporates in this story by showing what society was like and how they acted and spoke in the mid 1800’s. One thing to note is that due to racial slurs being so commonly used in the book and how African Americans were portrayed, the novel has been banned or challenged in many schools or libraries across the nation.

Even though the language in this book may be difficult to understand and some people may be sensitive to its themes, I still believe The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an entertaining and heartwarming story with an exciting plot and a good message about friendship that touches on enduring issues of freedom, social class, race, and many others.