HUCK JOURNAL #2
IS THERE A MORAL TO THIS STORY AND IS HUCK STILL PREJUDICED?
At the start of the book "Huckleberry Finn", the Author, mark Twain gives us this strange message. "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral will be banished; persons attempting to fin plot in it will be shot." After reading the entire book, one has to wonder if Twain really meant this, and if not, what is he trying to say? Or is perhaps, he trying to say nothing at all, and just kinda felt like putting some stupid message at the start, to confuse us all? That, and the very much related (in my opinion) question of weather Huck is still prejudiced at the end of the novel is what shall be discussed, analyzed, and thought about in this Journal Entry. Now to properly discuss this question, one (in this case Me) must first decide weather he/she (in this case I’m a he) thinks the book has a moral. Now, try as I might, I can’t come to a truly decisive conclusion on this, but it seems in his own odd, strange way Twain has indeed put one in here, by purpose or accident I have no clue. Now, the moral is not the type that sticks it nose out at you, far from it. If Mr. Twain had wanted to do that he would have ended the book something like this: "And now, I see the light, and fer shur’ I’m mighty glad that I helped set ol’ Jim free, for now I see that any person, white or nigger, is a person after all. And well persons’ all are a deservin’ freedom! By and by, maybe all persons’ will be free!" Now obviously that bad imitation of Mark Twain’s Style is not how the book ended. In fact, Huck doesn’t end up setting Jim free at all. But most definitely, Twain does poke fun at people’s hypocracity in the south, especially on the issue of slavery. Great example: "Was Anyone hurt?" "No, a nigger was killed." "Well thank goodness sometimes people do get hurt!" There is plenty of this spread throughout the book. As for if Huck is still prejudiced I’ll come straight out and say it: I think he is. However it is a very strange type of prejudice. As although he thinks that all blacks are inferior, etc. it is not really what he thinks. He doesn’t like society’s view, he rather hates it, but he still thinks it is right. He never questions it right or wrong, he just thinks it must be right. It is very much the same as how he views his friend Tom, with his "prisoner" thing. He hates all the stuff Tom says must be done to free Jim, he thinks it stupid, but at the wrong time he thinks it right. Their methods (Society and Tom) are both hated by Huck, and Huck tries to be separate from both, yet he thinks them right. Huck thinks himself wrong, yet he likes being wrong, cause its what he feels he needs to do. It is as if Right has a separate meaning for Huck than it does for you or me. For us it means the "good" thing to do, for him it means whatever society says. Period. No questions asked. Anyhow, to get slightly more back on target, Huck is still prejudiced, but really, its a false prejudice, one that he doesn’t have deep inside. Anyway, it doesn’t seem to be that the story really doesn’t have a moral, so that crosses out the possibility that Mark Twain really meant the "Notice." So what did he mean by it? The most logical answer is not my own. One of my "friends" at a "discussion" suggested that the real reason for the Notice was that Mark Twain, thought this would alert our notice to a moral, and we would look for one just to make sure that Mr. Twain wasn’t wrong. In short, reverse Psychiatry. But, Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens was a weird guy, so perhaps it was something else, and unless he told somebody once, we’ll never know. Perhaps, he just didn’t want People to become obsessed with the moral, rather than the actual book, that type of thing. Well, I guess we’ll just have to keep guessing.