Huck Finn - Critics
Walter Kendrick - From Huck Finn to Calvin Klein’s Billboard Nymphets
• Children themselves do not sentimentalise childhood.
• Huck Finn, with a little help from his stodgier friend Tom Sawyer, founded the empire of
childhood in the 1870’s.
Sanford Pinsker - Huckleberry Finn and the Problem of Freedom
• Freedom is America’s abiding subject, as well as its deepest problem.
• In this latter sense, to tell the truth about the world requires more than a careful attention to
realistic detail.
• Rather, it is a matter of burning away the social conditioning that puts layers of fat around the
should and that covers the eyes with motes.
• What the novel dramatises, however, is how dangerous and indeed, how deadly, certain
“stretchers” can become […] That romanticism of the sort behind the blood-curdling oaths
taken by would-be members of Tom Sawyer’s gang is one thing; when it generates the ongoing
feud of the Sheperdsons and the Grangerfords, however, this is another matter altogether.
• And the biggest lie of all is that anyone, black or white, could be genuinely free.
• Not just the shackles and the beatings, but also in the systematic way in which an entire people
was reduced to chattel property.
• Huck’s instinctive goodness turns out to be no match for Tom’s book-learning and charisma.
• Pursue it as Huck will, freedom remains an elusive promise, one that F. Scott Fitzgerald would
later characterise as the boats that forever recede into the past no matter how hard one
paddles.
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a deeply subversive book […] because it tells the Truth - not
“mainly,” but right down to the core.
Steve Mintz - Rethinking Huck
• It spoke to the greatest contradiction in American history: the existence of slavery and virulent
racial prejudice in a country dedicated to liberty and equality.
• Huckleberry Finn is the rst major novel in which the narrator speaks in dialect.
• Twain is showing that moral authority can come from a representative of “poor white trash”
• Its misogyny, depicting women either as nurturers or as controlling and repressive gures.
• A conclusion, as we shall see, that is far more ambiguous than readers sometime assume.
• The journey is not simply physical, but the metaphysical. It is a journey into the human psyche
and the cultural subconscious.
• Huckleberry Finn lays bare the sordid underside of antebellum American life.
fi fi
Walter Kendrick - From Huck Finn to Calvin Klein’s Billboard Nymphets
• Children themselves do not sentimentalise childhood.
• Huck Finn, with a little help from his stodgier friend Tom Sawyer, founded the empire of
childhood in the 1870’s.
Sanford Pinsker - Huckleberry Finn and the Problem of Freedom
• Freedom is America’s abiding subject, as well as its deepest problem.
• In this latter sense, to tell the truth about the world requires more than a careful attention to
realistic detail.
• Rather, it is a matter of burning away the social conditioning that puts layers of fat around the
should and that covers the eyes with motes.
• What the novel dramatises, however, is how dangerous and indeed, how deadly, certain
“stretchers” can become […] That romanticism of the sort behind the blood-curdling oaths
taken by would-be members of Tom Sawyer’s gang is one thing; when it generates the ongoing
feud of the Sheperdsons and the Grangerfords, however, this is another matter altogether.
• And the biggest lie of all is that anyone, black or white, could be genuinely free.
• Not just the shackles and the beatings, but also in the systematic way in which an entire people
was reduced to chattel property.
• Huck’s instinctive goodness turns out to be no match for Tom’s book-learning and charisma.
• Pursue it as Huck will, freedom remains an elusive promise, one that F. Scott Fitzgerald would
later characterise as the boats that forever recede into the past no matter how hard one
paddles.
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a deeply subversive book […] because it tells the Truth - not
“mainly,” but right down to the core.
Steve Mintz - Rethinking Huck
• It spoke to the greatest contradiction in American history: the existence of slavery and virulent
racial prejudice in a country dedicated to liberty and equality.
• Huckleberry Finn is the rst major novel in which the narrator speaks in dialect.
• Twain is showing that moral authority can come from a representative of “poor white trash”
• Its misogyny, depicting women either as nurturers or as controlling and repressive gures.
• A conclusion, as we shall see, that is far more ambiguous than readers sometime assume.
• The journey is not simply physical, but the metaphysical. It is a journey into the human psyche
and the cultural subconscious.
• Huckleberry Finn lays bare the sordid underside of antebellum American life.
fi fi
