You know how some books feel less like you’re reading and more like you’re actually living inside someone’s messy, complicated head? That’s exactly how Huckleberry Finn hit me. From the very first page, I wasn’t just following Huck—I was Huck. The dirt under his nails, the way he itches to be free from “sivilized” life, the pull between what society tells him is right and what his gut screams is true… it’s all so raw that you don’t just read it, you feel it.
This is something about Huck--he is not slick, not even certain half the time what he thinks. That is what makes him real. You see him develop in these little almost imperceptible stages as he drifts down the Mississippi with Jim. And man, Jim. He is the core of the story, I will say honestly. Whenever Huck and Jim would talk like that on the raft--to each other--it seemed somehow like overhearing a sacrament. I would think, this is how friendship should be when the world keeps saying that it is not supposed to exist.
And of course there is the gut-punch moment. You are probably familiar with the one-Huck sitting there, in pieces, trying to decide whether to betray Jim or not. All his life he had heard that it was wrong to help an enslaved man get away. But this is Huck, with palpitating heart: and the words burst out: All right, then, I will go to hell. I feel I will never forget that line. It was not only Huck undergoing the moment, it was like witnessing a person decide to take the side of humanity over all the lies that he or she has been taught. It took the wind out of me.
What I also liked is that Twain allowed humor to creep in even the gloomiest passages. Huck has a knack of seeing people at their foolish side--their arrogance, their mean- spiritedness--and of calling it like it is, with no sugar on it. At times I had to laugh out loud, as when the warring families, the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons, murder one another in church during a sermon on brotherly love. It is crazy, it is sad and in a certain way Twain makes you laugh and then it hits you, how screwed up it is.
The river itself was like a character. Whenever Huck and Jim would push off and go with the current I could swear I could hear the water slapping on the raft. The river was freedom--it swept them away on a flood of untruth, of meanness, of imprisonments devised by the edicts of man. Yet it was hazardous, as well. You did not know whether the next corner would be the corner of peace or of devastation. That tension kept me glued to the book as I was floating along with them not knowing what was in store downstream.
After I finished the book, I did not only feel that I read a classic. I suppose I experienced something, I felt like I lived through it, through the confusion of Huck, through the silent power of Jim and the insanity of a society that claims to be civilized and behaves like it owns human beings as property. It made me feel strange and connected in the most positive way, where Twain did not want me to have the last page, and simply pass on. He had me grapple with it. And am I still.
Honestly? Huckleberry Finn is more than an adventure story. It’s messy, it’s funny, it’s heartbreaking, and it’s still uncomfortably true.
The last three images was gotten from web:
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