Răspuns:
Celebrated by Ernest Hemingway as the source of all modern American litera-
ture, and regarded by many as a great American novel, Adventures of Huckle-
berry Finn has always been controversial. In Twain’s day it was criticized for taking
as its hero a boy who smoked, loafed, and preferred the company of a runaway slave
to Sunday School. Banned in some school districts and denounced by some schol-
ars and teachers as racist, it has been defended by others as a powerful attack on
racism. Its lengthy and ambiguous !nal section, when the plot to free Jim gives way
to an account of Tom Sawyer’s pranks, has also provoked controversy. This short
selection of critical writings provides a sampling of modern debate on the novel.
Below are the con"icting voices of literary critics and novelists on Jim as a char-
acter, on Huck’s relationship with Jim, on the use of the “n-word,” on race in gen-
eral, and on the problematic ending. Some of the writers here are sharply critical of
the book for what they see as its failure to follow through on its initial premise, that
Jim is an admirable character whose drive for freedom expresses a basic human need.
Others argue that there is no such failure, that the book maintains its attack on those
who deny Jim’s status as a human being. The controversy is possible because Twain’s
ironic humor makes his own position dif!cult to identify. Leo Marx thinks Jim’s drive
for freedom is trivialized by an ending in which Huck becomes Tom Sawyer’s yes-
man. Julius Lester criticizes the book’s depiction of Jim along the same lines, argu-
ing that Jim becomes more of a minstrel-show !gure than the admirable person he
had earlier been. Jane Smiley, also disturbed by Twain’s depiction of this black char-
acter, proposes Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) as a better model
for American literature. In contrast, David L. Smith argues that the novel under-
cuts racist discourse with a trenchant critique of nineteenth-century conceptions of
“the Negro.” Toni Morrison offers insights into her own experience of reading the
novel a number of times over many years, concluding that Huckleberry Finn is a clas-
sic in part because of the powerful way that it raises but does not answer questions
about race, culture, character, and nation. Finally, Alan Gribben explains his deci-
sion to create a new edition of the novel, published in 2011, that replaces its most
infamous racial epithet with the word “slave”; Michiko Kakutani, writing in the New
York Times, argues that Gribben’s substitution whitewashes the “harsh historical
realities” that Twain’s novel portrays....Acesta este rezumatul in engleza!
