Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free Page A

sometimes calls “Nigger Jim”) as “not only a slave but a human being, a man who in some ways was to be envied.” Echoing Brown, Ellison praises Jim’s portraiture, particularly its inclusion of faults that humanize: “Twain, though guilty of the sentimentality common to humorists, does not idealize the slave. Jim is drawn in all his ignorance and superstition, with his good traits and his bad. He, like all men, is ambiguous, limited in circumstance but not in possibility.” For Ellison, what’s most significant is Jim’s role as Twain’s shining “symbol of humanity, and in freeing Jim, Huck makes a bid to free himself of the conventionalized evil taken for civilization by the town.” g
    Yet Ellison, writing in the 1950s, more than ten years after his first defense of Jim, also began to find fault with Jim’s portrayal. On second thought, the figure was so close, he said, to the tradition of blackface minstrelsy—that form of American theater best known for its feature of white men wearing burned cork on their faces to imitate, typically in grotesque exaggerations, black American forms of song and dance—that black readers keep their distance from Huckleberry’s black friend. Recalling his reading the book as a boy, Ellison says, “[I] could imagine myself as Huck Finn (I so nicknamed my brother), but not, though I racially identified with him, as Nigger Jim [sic; recall again that this was never Mark Twain’s phrase], who struck me as a white man’s inadequate portrait of a slave.” h Elsewhere, Ellison said that Twain evidently did not calculate blacks among the readers of his novel: “It was a dialogue between... a white American novelist of good heart, of democratic vision, one dedicated to values... and white readers, primarily,” he said. And Twain’s failure as an artist, in this view, is that he relied too much on the barroom joke and minstrel show for images of blacks rather than seeking true images, not only from lived experience but from prior forms of literature, depicting blacks and other figures from beneath the social hierarchy. To this degree, Twain was “not quite as literary a man as he was required to be,” wrote Ellison, “because he could have gone to Walter Scott, to the Russians, to any number of places, and found touch-stones for filling out the complex humanity of that man who appeared in his book out of his own imagination, and who was known as Jim.” i
    In her eloquent commentary on Huckleberry Finn, the novelist Toni Morrison finds the solution to Huck’s loneliness and despair to be not the godlike river—with its own terrible unpredictability—but the companionship of Jim. Floating on their raft, free from the troubles of the shore, Huck and Jim talk quietly, and their communion together is “so free of lies it produces an aura of restfulness and peace unavailable anywhere else in the novel.” j But given the real distance between blacks and whites in America, Morrison says, so extreme today and infinitely more so a hundred-plus years ago, this wonderful friendship is doomed, and as savvy southerners, Jim and Huck know in advance that it is doomed. Morrison says that this inevitable split between the two friends, the novel’s underlying tragedy, helps explain why Twain presented Jim in such exaggeratedly outsized stereotyped terms—lest Huck or the reader get too close to him. “Anticipating this loss may have led Twain to the over-the-top minstrelization of Jim,” writes Morrison. “Predictable and common as the gross stereotyping of blacks was in nineteenth-century literature, here, nevertheless, Jim’s portrait seems unaccountably excessive and glaring in its contradictions—like an ill-made clown suit that cannot hide the man within.”
    So as Said-trained readers we receive Jim through this absurd stereotyped suit—receive his humanity, his fatherly sense of responsibility for Huck, his courage, family care, and industriousness, and wisdom—just as