American Experience in Huck Finn

“All modern American Literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn..” claimed Ernest Hemingway, a American author and journalist. This quote represents the idea and perception of Huckleberry Finn as a defining moment in American Literature, a time when a new culture was being formed west of the Atlantic that had many different subjects and characteristics than that of the literature in Europe. What makes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn so original and such a representation of America is that whatever Huckleberry Finn, the character, is about or can be defined by, is what America was all about. Through this complex character, Mark Twain was able to create a new American experience and show the reader all about it. The main characteristics of the American experience that Mark Twain represented through this character included a social commentary on the southern culture and its response to slavery and its general antebellum culture, the nature that defines America and how America defines its nature and the freedom from it, and the new anti-materialistic hero.

The opening of the book deals with the most serious issue depicted; the idea of slavery and the response of the southerners to its injustices. The majority of the American experience of slavery and its response are shown through the relationship between the main protagonist, Huck and his friend Jim. When Jim first approaches Huck to tell him that he has run away from his master Huck replies, “People would call me a low down Abolitionist and despise me for keeping mum- but that don’t make no difference. I ain’t agoing to tell..” (1379). In a time when it was illegal to aide slaves in their escape, Huck was just beginning to start his moral dilemma of his loyalties to the law, and his friendship with Jim. This brings about a side note on the American experience of slavery that is not as developed as the response to slavery in Huck and that is: how does a person act and feel in a

Cited: Twain, Mark. “ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” The Harper Single Volume American Literature. Ed. McQuade et al. New York: Longman.1999. 1355-1522 Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999, p.2 and 6.