Google e-book, 313 pages, 1885
Earlier this year, a publisher decided to print an edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that substituted "slave" for a certain infamous racial slur that occurs 219 times in the novel. This is not all that interesting in and of itself, but around the same time, this jackass decided to attempt to turn around a lifetime of violent racism by "apologizing" for it on national television, and a comment on Metafilter decided to pull the two stories together and set a quote from said jackass ("And I found out there is no way I could be saved and get to heaven and still not like blacks") against the climactic scene in Huck Finn, in which Huck decides that he will go to hell rather than turn Jim in to his owner. That comparison alone was enough to make me reconsider the novel I'd read as an 11th grade AP English student and completely dismissed because it was written in dialect and was about a bunch of hicks and, like, slavery was over anyway. (Oh how embarrassing it is to recall this.)
Upon rereading, I still don't think Huckleberry Finn is a watershed moment in the history of American race relations. The climax is a truly life-changing and dramatic moment, but there are so many problems in the rest of the book (particularly the portrayal of Jim as a servile buffoon) that it loses some of its impact, and overall the messages are mixed. I do admire it for other reasons, though. Huck's voice is charming and expressive, and signified a break from proper British prose and the beginning of a genuine American literature. The book works best as a coming-of-age story, the story of Huck's search for freedom and developing sense of right and wrong (not only regarding Jim and slavery but also in scenes like the attempted swindle of the Wilks sisters, from which Jim is completely absent).
Among all the book endings I've read this year (or ever, really), the last paragraph of Huck Finn is one of my favorites:
"Tom's most well now, and got his bullet around his neck on a watch-guard for a watch, and is always seeing what time it is, and so there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it, and ain't a-going to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before."
(Note: I read this Google ebook, which seems to be the only free copy in Google Books that is plain text instead of a scanned PDF. I think they used some kind of text-recognition software to convert it--most of it is okay, but there are times when it tries to turn dialect into "real" words [for example, "clumb," the past tense of "climb" in Huck's dialect, becomes "dumb"], and it really, REALLY doesn't like Jim's speech and periodically turns it into sprays of random letters and punctuation marks. I had to consult the print version a couple times to figure out what was going on. Probably worth paying the 5 bucks for a paper copy, if you don't live in Japan.)
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