Source- The UC Libraries Newsletter

Libraries
- Hours and Maps

Quicklinks

Search

A Good Book - Huck Finn and His Tradition

By Leland S. Person, Professor and Department Head Department of English and Comparative Literature

I have taught a course called “Huck Finn and His Tradition” several times. I start with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and then assign several 20th-century novels—first-person vernacular narratives featuring a socially marginalized adolescent protagonist who critiques prominent features of society (e.g., slavery). I have taught Faulkner’s The Reivers, Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories, Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina.

Three recent novels are worth adding to my list: Lee Smith’s The Last Girls (2002), Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, and Nancy Rawles’ My Jim (2005).

The Last Girls features four middle-aged women who once rafted down the Mississippi River (inspired by Huck’s narrative) and now reunite on a luxury steamboat bound for New Orleans in order to reminisce about their lives.

Sebold’s best-selling The Lovely Bones unravels a thread from Twain’s novels—everyone’s desire to see how people react to your death—into a compelling narrative from a brutally murdered girl’s point of view.

Nancy Rawles’ My Jim narrates events that lurked outside the narrative space of Huckleberry Finn. Sadie Watson (Jim’s wife) describes slave life in Hannibal—a parallel universe that Twain’s novel only touches upon—and fleshes out Jim’s side of the story. We learn more about how Jim’s daughter Lisbeth became deaf. We see Jim defy his master when he refuses to let a child be abused. He humors the “white boys” (Huck and Tom) who pay him to foretell the future. He works to buy his family (Sadie, Jonnie, Lisbeth) out of slavery. After being freed by Miss Watson’s will, he returns to Hannibal to retrieve his wife and children—too late, as it turns out. The Huck Finn tradition marches on.

Source Index