Julius Lester Argument On Huckleberry Finn

MORALITY AND THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN

Julius Lester is against Mark Twain’s book, The adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Lester believes that it should not be read in public schools.His argument starts

explaining that he never had to read the book in school, that he was lucky. He uses a

variety of reasons to explain his point (evidence). His main reason is that the bookin his opinion is biased against African American people (an insult to history) and

that the book is in no way moral because ’The truly use, ‘moral is far broader, far

more difficult, andless certain of itself that bourgeois morality, because it is not

concerned with the ‘what’ of behavior, (he doesn’t care about the actions of the

character itself) but to the spirit we bring toour living (his intentions and message),

and, by implication, to literature.’’ According to Lester, ‘’Twain did not take slavery

and therefore black people, seriously,’’ because he formedsome kind of parallelism

between Huck and his drunk father and the real slaves (I do not see it in that way, I

believe Huck was running away from a completely different problem and that it isnot related with slavery or comparison between races). Also he says that the fact

that Jim didn’t go and reach his freedom at Illinois is against logic (I believe that Jim

wanted to take hisfamily with him and also developed some kind of father-son

relationship with Huck; that is why he didn’t do it in my opinion. I see Jim’s

character as someone really caring and unselfish)making the novel non-credible.

His warrant is that there is some kind of ‘’abysmal feelings of superiority’’ on the

bases of the white man’s society. Some of the actions in the characters of thebook

seem to be biased to him, per example, the fact that Tom Sawyer didn’t confess that

Jim was free until the end (to me it sounds like Tom just wanted another adventure

and was trying...