"Not A World-Shaking Idea"

The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, narrates a “tangled story about a race and about America”. A boy narrates the story and the article “A Scholar Finds Huck´s Finn Voice in Twain´s Writing About A Black Youth states that Twain got the idea for Huck´s character from a negro boy he had met before he began to write the novel.

Including this one, I have already read two articles that somehow criticize an aspect of Twain´s novel. And both of them seem illogical to me. One of them talked about banning the word “nigger” from the book because for modern-day readers it was considered an insult. And this one says that if the backgrounds of African American roots are found the book would also have to be changed. The examples given in the article about “Sociable Jimmy”, the negro who supposedly inspired Twain are very plausible. “Jimmy allows him to liberate the language that laid buried in Twain´s linguistic repertoire”. And I do not see anything wrong with that, instead it is something positive, that gives the novel more credibility about the topic that its talking about. The book is already written, there is no purpose in changing it for it was done the way it is. Professor Fishkin´s argument is right but it is pointless that the novel will decay if the ideas did actually come from a negro boy.

Huckleberry Finn would still be the same. And the black roots that influenced Twain will give more support to the moral changes the characters encounters in the novel. He depicts his character as someone that although was pressured by society, does the right thing and maybe could not be done as well if Twain had not had that conversation with Jimmy. The criticism expressed in both articles is valid. But there is no point in changing a classic because of aspects that give it its importance. Instead of looking at this as Dr. Fishkin said, we should see that what was discovered is that “ the black American linguistic voice which forms the structuring principle, of the great American novel, and that ain´t bad”.