Racial Politics in Huckleberry Finn

Abstract

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (188–45) is the best-known novel in America’s literary history. Sales figures have been estimated at over 20 million worldwide.² Hemingway said that ‘All modern American literature comes from ... Huckleberry Finn’. T. S. Eliot called it a masterpiece.³ It is one of the few American novels where new academic scholarship or dispute consistently stimulates wider public interest, as in the case of the 1991 discovery of the first two-fifths of the handwritten manuscript of the novel. ‘Jim and the Dead Man’, a previously unknown passage found here (edited out prior to the book’s original publication), received considerable attention when it appeared in the New Yorker in 1995, placed along-side the comments of five contemporary American writers reflecting on ‘Twain’s novel and our most persistent moral dilemma’. The exact nature of this dilemma is not specified. William Styron, though, indicates its implied grounds in writing that Huck and Jim, ‘with their confused and incalculable feelings for each other, remain symbols of our racial confusion’.⁴

‘Now, old Jim, you’re a free man again, and I bet you won’t ever be a slave no more.’

(The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) ¹