A Review of the Novel “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain
The following text is a review of the novel “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain which is starred and narrated by Huckleberry Finn, a child who to get rid of his abusive father decides to fake his death and escape through the Mississippi river where he meets with Jim, who is also running away, and together, they leave in an adventure towards freedom.
I decided to make a book review because I wanted to evaluate in a positive constructive way Twain’s literary work and show my understanding of the novel. Also, because I think it is an appropriate text type to express my own ideas of the book on the basis of my personal taste.
To make this text easily readable to my young adult audience I will use a tone and style intended to engage the reader with a semi-formal register that allows me to be sufficiently expressive with my ideas and not leave ambiguities about the subject.
“Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is considered the masterpiece of Mark Twain, and surprisingly, it’s less popular than “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” one of the most celebrated novels in American literature.
There are several reasons for that, this novel shows strong problems that even today continue to be scandalous and in that time even more. It’s about a young boy named Huckleberry Finn who has had a difficult life and decides to run away of his alcoholic father and float down the Mississippi River where he joins a runaway slave named Jim. The reader wants to find out how this mischievous duo with scarce education and no family overcome an array of obstacles in their journey for freedom.
The book is an exceptional story of adventures, with an intense rhythm that catches you from the first page and maintains the attention without rest; however, under the superficial part there is a judgment about human behavior expressed through the use of the innocent eye protagonist child without any kind of “cultural manipulation” as a way to criticize certain social norms of the society of the nineteenth century.
Twain uses this technique and creates a more complex protagonist since Huck is not an entirely innocent child; he lived with an abusive father so he has trouble trusting in adults, and like most of the society of his time has racial prejudices. That’s how the author began to take a realistic look about humanity in humans, with pessimism that far from fading was increasing day by day.
For example, Twain’s critics of people who think they are more intelligent than Huck and therefore morally superior for having read a book like the king for reading Shakespeare. The ridiculousness of the situation is that Huck uses common sense and knows that certain things are non-sense but does not question it because “as they have read books, they will know more about everything in general”.
On the other hand, much of the excellence of this work lies in the language used in it. The fact that it is written just like a teenager speaks, the author makes grammatical and pronunciation mistakes, repeats a lot of things so it really seems that you have Huck in front of you and he is telling you what happened to him. Twain makes incredible use of colloquial language and experiments with it, which differentiates him from other American writers of the time.
Moreover, since the story is written in first-person point of view it allows us to know many of Huck’s internal debates and how he thinks about what is good or wrong for society. Also, we can appreciate in the best way possible the evolution of his character. How at the beginning the kid was clearly racist and considered Jim an inferior person just because he was a black slave and then how after spending time with him Huck not only developed affection for him, he also thought of Jim as a paternal figure in his life.
That’s why “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is considered a beautiful work of literature that combines humor, sarcasm and intelligence in the best way possible to criticize the society of that century and also teaches us many magnificent things about friendship, adolescence and happiness. If you haven’t read it yet, have the great pleasure to do it!
