Huckleberry Finn Persuasive Non-Racist Paper
...Twain). This part of the novel is very important because it describes the fact that Huck can see that Jim has emotions. Huck feels very badly for hurting Jim who has become almost like a father figure for Huck. At many points in the book, Jim remarks about how much he loves and misses his family. Huck notices this and at one point says, “I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks does for their’n” (Twain 155). This is a very powerful statement for Huck to make. The passages shows that a white child who was brought up to believe that slavery is the way that life should be for black people now believes that a black person has feelings and acts like a human being. Huck remarks that he believes that Jim is actually a person. For someone like Huck to think this means that their relationship had to be strong and something had to show Huck that at least all black people are not stupid items for people to use in slave labor. Huck wants Jim to be free. He wants to help his friend Jim have his freedom more than he wants to not burn in hell. After writing a letter to Miss Watson telling her where to find Jim, his conscience comes into play and he says, “’All right then, I’ll go to hell’ – and tore it up” (Twain 214). This is one of the most dramatic scenes in the book. Huck knows that if he is caught for helping a slave to freedom, he could be hanged. Despite all of that, Huck realizes that he cannot turn in his friend who may in turn be hanged if he is caught. Huck’s relationship with Jim just grows stronger throughout the book and shows how highly he thinks of Jim. The arguments given for why the novel is racist are either misinterpretations or do not deal with the novel itself directly. One argument that many people have brought up is that people will use “nigger” in conversation because they read the word in a book (Beckett). Just because people read the word “nigger”, they won’t go out of their way to use it. There is a large portion of society that already uses the word, and reading it isn’t going to affect the ways they use it. For those who do not use the word, though it is strange at first to read the word “nigger” many times per page, after realizing the context that it is in, it is not hard to just read right over the word. So, this argument seems to be against society and not against the book. Though the word is extremely offensive towards the black race, the book was written in the language of the time. You cannot blame Twain for trying to make the book realistic. Along with Twain’s approach of making the book realistic, he also uses satire a great deal. Human cruelty is one of the ideas that Twain is trying to use satire to change. The idea of human cruelty is very broad, but a few of the points that Twain atta...