In Chapter 1 of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck spoke for Mark Twain when he made the statement, “You don’t know about me…but that ain’t no matter.” The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was not a sequel to his other adventure stories but a literary statement questioning how civilized our American society was.
Twain was not a racist but a realist. The perception of racism in the novel should be attributed to the historical setting and the effect it had on its characters. The story took place in the South before the Civil War. The South’s economic structure depended on keeping the Negro in servitude. Many white Americans accepted slavery and believed the Negroes were inferior which resulted in racist attitudes and behaviors. Twain used the character development of Jim and Huck to demonstrate how these attitudes could change once Huck was able to see past the cultural stereotype of Jim being a Negro and recognize he was a person who was both noble and decent and deserved to be free like any other man whether he was black or white.
Twain’s early development of the character Jim has been controversial because of the apparent racism. In the early chapters, Jim was portrayed as a typical slave stereotype: superstitious, ignorant, and naive. On two separate occasions, Huck delighted in exploiting Jim’s superstitious beliefs to play a joke on him. In Chapter 10, Huck put a dead snake in Jim’s blanket after Jim had warned him that, “it was the worse luck in the world to touch a snakeskin.” Then Huck realized Jim wasn’t the fool he thought him to be when the dead rattlesnake’s mate returned and bit Jim. Huck played his last trick on Jim after they passed Cairo and got separated by the currents.
At first, Huck thought it was funny to pretend that they had never been separated, but he was humbled by Jim’s reactions which showed both dignity and his strong sense of value. Huck’s viewpoint of Jim was changing, but his former upbringi…
