Anthony Kolbus

Anthony Kolbus

1/10/14

5^th hour

Mrs. Kloser

Outline

            In the past 20 years high school students, and school boards have struggled with the decision to read and teach the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because of the explicit content it contains and also because of the use of the word “nigger”.

            Everyone that has read the novel can agree that the word “nigger” is a terrible word that should have never existed in the first place. This is why there is such debate to have students in schools read the book at all or read a censored version of the story. But in that scenario I would ask the obvious question first: perhaps there is another story that the students could read that they could essentially learn the same things that without being exposed to that explicit content.

            On the other hand, in modern times it is a good thing that people are shocked by the offensiveness of the word because it reminds everyone of the way our society was during the beginning of our country and that we share that past.  

In my opinion I think that the word “nigger” should not be removed or replaced with the word “slave” because the two words in now way share the same meaning or any similarities whatsoever and are therefore interchangeable. For example, in the novel, there is a scene in the story where the main character Huck plays a cruel trick on Jim, but then feels sorry for his actions and says “It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger” (Twain 55). Here Huck is not saying he is humbling himself to a slave or Jim, but he means really means to say a “nigger” because that word is much more powerful and demeaning than saying that he is humbling himself to a slave. And Twain intended it to be that way because if he had wanted to say a slave he would have said slave, the same way a painter would have chosen the color blue instead of red for example. Changing an author’s work by removing a word that plays a very important role in the story would change the entire effect of the story.

However, most people are shocked by the word because they believe there is no use for the word. Most audiences see the word being there as unnecessary, but even more specifically because it offends many African Americans too. For example, a law professor named Paul Butler wrote to the New York Times saying that while he read the novel “white kids going out of their way to say “Nigger Jim” and the teacher’s tortured explanation that Twain’s “nigger” didn’t really mean nigger, or meant it ironically, or historically, or symbolically”(Butler). But this is an example of how it was the school’s fault that allowed its own students that misused the word “nigger”, which in turn led to an entire group of students that misunderstood the “historical” and “symbolic” significance of the novel. Unfortunately this in turn affected this man who is still scared by the improper use of the word.

Many audiences believe that mark Twain is racist for using “nigger” so blatantly throughout the story. In Chadwick Joshua’s book “The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn” there is a section of the book where he talks about a specific part in Huckleberry Jim, where Jim helped a little boy after he had been shot during his escape, and all the “white” people yell at Jim and call him “nigger” and Chadwick Joshua points out that while they yell at Jim, he shows his humanity to them by staying silent, “The mob’s response after hearing from the doctor about Jim’s unquestionable humanity adds that parodic  satiric spice that pervades this novel”(Joshua 129). This shows that Twain is not racist because even he sees Jim as a human.

Now going back to the question of should this book be taught in schools because of the explicit content, I would say that this book is no where near a children’s book, and that the school better have a very good reason for choosing this book of all books, because this book is almost the equivalent to that of an R-rated film. That being said I would say this book is only for Juniors in high school at the least. Not at all appropriate for younger children. Also you have to look at what you want to teach from a story and if the only thing that is going to happen from reading this book are debates about the word “nigger” than there is no need to read it at all.

Works Cited

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  Edited by Shelley Fisher Fiskin; introduction by Toni Morrison, afterword by Victor Doyno. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Chadwick- Joshua, Jocelyn.  The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998.

           

Butler, Paul. "Why Read That Book." Why Read That Book (2006): n. pag. Web.