WRITEN TASK: BOOK REVIEW THE ADVENTURES OF HUCK FINN

‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’: Huck’s Ark

By Isabel Mora (01109275)

Children’s games? Hide and seek? No! Too boring. I rather set about an adventure with Huckleberry Finn! Along with the slave Jim, Huck embarks on a treacherous odyssey through caves, rivers, prisons, meeting and loading kings, dukes and pirates.

Huckleberry Finn, the narrator of Mark Twain’s novel “The adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, is a 12 year-old boy who has a terrible experience regarding family relationships. However, full of energy and mischievousness, Huck questions whether the rules are blameless or iniquitous, whether society is condign or askew. Prevailing the cataclysms of society (who marked that niggers and whites should not be treated as equals), Huck’s innocence is the tool used by Twain to criticize society. Mark Twain, pseudonym of Samuel Clemens, and his more than 30 books are world wide known because of his social criticism –moral and politically speaking-, beclouded with cloak of humor, irony and satire, which conveys to a sagacious reflection towards society, specially the society of the 19th century. Nonetheless, the criticism made in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, novel written two decades before the Civil War in order to assail the racist and intolerant society of the time, was considered too harsh and abhorrent; so much as it was banned in schools and libraries of the United States. Despite the fact it was banned, the book has a strong theme –typical of American literature- and leads to a profound meditation of a bigot, reckless and indifferent society, besides, this is even stronger as it is narrated by an innocent soul. It is very remarkable the usage of dialogue –black and southern dialects- in this novel, whose effectiveness takes you back into 1840. “Yo’ ole father doan’ know, yit, whats he’s a-gwyne to do…” (“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” M. Twain. page 246)