Just Finished Reading Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Mark Twain's famed novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn came out in 1884, eight years after The Adventures of Tom Sawyer introduced the title character, who narrates the story in his very regional, uneducated idiosyncratic way...one of the charming aspects to this book.  The setting is rural Missouri along the Mississippi River some fifty years earlier when it was still a slave state and the "n" word was a regular part of people's vernacular, without the taboo overtly racist overtones it carries today.  But from our own convenient, semi-enlightened vantage point we can see that racism runs rampant in Huck's time as human beings are subject to being owned and controlled by others simply for their skin color and African origin.  Huck's alcoholic and abusive father, thought to have died, returns and wants his son's money from the treasure he and Tom won in the previous book, but the judge overseeing the funds won't release them.  Huck's adventures take off when he escapes his father's clutches by faking his own death and taking a raft down the river.  Jim, a runaway slave, runs into him and the two begin their odyssey together along the Mississippi.  I'll leave you, the potential reader, to discover the details and how the story resolves itself...

Twain presents The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through the eyes of an "innocent", that is a character who is relatively ignorant of the ways of society and sees things in a more straightforward manner...I believe that Dustin Hoffman's protagonist in Little Big Man and Tom Hanks' in Forrest Gump are derived from this literary tradition.  In doing so, the author is able to subtly deliver social commentary and criticism without getting into the reader's face to make his point...pretty crafty, I say.  Mark Twain was a foe of slavery and did not shy away from taking on the subject head-on and honestly, although some...once again conveniently using hindsight from the present perspective...could criticize the speech of Jim and other black characters as being intended for comedic relief.  I dare say that a Mark Twain living in 2019 would treat these characters differently as well...

The only part of Huckleberry Finn I have a real beef with is the ending, where due to a highly improbable state of circumstances the title character hooks up again with his old buddy Tom Sawyer and then fades into the background as Tom takes over the story...Twain was probably hedging his bets when he did this, wanting the book to capitalize on its predecessor's success.  But it had the effect of stopping the narrative in its tracks, very frustrating to me...

So now that I've recently read three Mark Twain books in relatively rapid succession, I'm ready for another.  But which one will it be?  Stay tuned to find out...