I Love Huckleberry Finn

I have a cold and am spending a few days in bed – not a bad thing. It means I let my responsibilities slide. When I’m ill, I read like mad, almost always fiction, and today I started Huck Finn for maybe the 12th time in my life.

I read Huck every two years or so because it is the best American novel, meaning it is magic, magical words on a page that make characters and places come to life. Shakespeare, if he were an American, could not have written Huck Finn better than Twain.

Huck is the narrator and he is an innocent. He uses the N-word but doesn’t mean anything negative by it. It’s how white people in his culture spoke. He is not prejudiced. He protects the slave Jim because it’s the right thing to do. Huck always tries to do the right thing. He is better than I am because I don’t always try to do the right thing. I am in awe of Huck.

He is an unreliable narrator – that is his charm. Sometimes he misunderstands things and we have to read through his misunderstanding to see the real truth of a scene, which means as readers, we are writing the book with Twain and Huck. What a lark. An example. When he refuses to surrender Jim back to being a slave he thinks he’s done something wrong – his culture would say he did something wrong. But we understand, in spite of himself, how correct he is.

Twain never wrote anything else as good as Huck, not close. And he ruined the ending of this miraculous book. But who cares. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a monument to life and literature. And it’s getting me through this cold.