Social Themes in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel that will continue to
be read for decades to come. Why? The novel by Mark Twain, or Samuel
Clemens, has many themes that relate to society today. Even today society
continues to talk about whether the novel should be read amongst high-
school curriculums. Society is also continuing to deal with racism, and
its effects on the lives of African-Americans. Another theme that is
prevalent in society is lying among American children.
Huck Finn is a self taught liar, and a very good one at that. On
the raft, while floating down the Mississippi, Huck has an opportunity to
exercise his gift for lying. The boy enjoys mendacity; he lies for the
sake of lying and keeps the reader turning the page piling on one fiction
after another. Just before the runaways get started, Huck visits a
neighboring town to get information and encounters a farmer's wife. He is
dressed in an old dress and is pretending to be a young girl searching for
her relatives. The woman suspects his sex and tries various devices to
ascertain if her suspicions are true. Among these is threading a needle
and throwing a bar of lead at the rats which swarm around the house.
Finally she makes Huck own up that he is a boy. In any case, this is a
great example of a young boy lying until his nose is a foot long. Lying is
prevalent among today's children as well.
Racism has an obvious connection to today's society. In the novel
Huck says many "racist" comments. In this scene Aunt Sally hears of a
steamboat explosion.
"Good gracious! anybody hurt?" she asks.
"No'm," comes the answer. "Killed a nigger."
Aunt Sally later refers to the "nigger" as if they are not even a
person, regarding the death as if it did not even matter.
"Well, it's lucky because sometimes people do get hurt."
At first glance at the novel Huckleberry Finn, many would protest
to the explicit use of the "N" word which was used over two-hundred times.
As a result Huck Finn, one of the greatest American novels is noteworthy.
This book was not written to besmirch the blacks of any rights or defame
their character. This book was written to prove a point about the racial
tension in the South before the Civil War. Therefore, Twain had no
intention of being racist. In fact the message Twain is sending is
anything but racist. Today, racism has nearly disappeared from our lives.
There are still many individual racists but for the most part this disease
has been cured. As in the book, most people described as racists are not,
for they are just mistaken.
There are school districts across the nation that are debating
whether to ban their children from reading Huckleberry Finn. If this book
is taught, the novel can open student's eyes to the racial tension that
ignorance causes. The students will become aware of their history. They
will not be deprived of a lesson in their past that describes what their
great-grandparents went through. We have to remember that Huck Finn was
written fifty years before Martin Luther King Jr. was born. During those
times it was acceptable to lynch an African American man, and acceptable to
use the "N" word. If this book is taken out of high-school curriculums
where would students learn about the history of racism?
In conclusion, the many themes present in Huck Finn will always be
relevant to modern society. I believe that Huckleberry Finn will forever
be regarded as a literary classic and as a novel that should be read and
enjoyed by people of all ages.
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