The Panorama of Race and Realistic Representation in Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Abstract

This paper studies Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, contending that regardless of Twain’s intention, his novel, on the surface, might look racist, but in a deeper level it is not, simply because it is a realistic novel which depicts slavery life before the American Civil War: it renders social spheres and facts about Blacks as they actually existed. However, in his attempt to depict slavery life in the United States in the 1840s in a realistic novelistic form, the result was a book, which is full of racist paraphernalia. The paper argues that despite the racist material in the novel, there are different aspects of the novel which explain that Twain’s novel is not racist. For example, Twain doesn’t seem in the novel to favor Whites over Blacks; he creates a close relationship between the White Huck and the Black Jim to emphasize that Black and White men can be friends. Although at the beginning Jim is rendered by Huck in a negative way, his picture, as this paper explains, grows positively throughout the narrative. Jim becomes a symbol of a profound faithfulness and humanity. Moreover, the paper explains how Twain depicts in the novel the falsity of stereotypes, and evokes many satirical comments on the racist thinking of some White characters who are represented in the novel as immoral and tyrants.