Monday, October 10, 2011

Book Review: Huckleberry Finn

Huck Finn is a story of friendship, of overcoming adversity and of doing what your heart tells you, rather than what society says is the right thing to do. Huck and Jim are faced with many obstacles that they need to overcome, but some of those obstacles feel unrelated to the novel.

The entire situation with the con artists that call themselves The King and The Duke is a giant symbol of the darker parts of human nature: greed, deceit, etc. At the end of the part of the novel dealing with them, the situation does tie into the rest of the plot, but up until that point you don't quite understand why things are happening. After that point you just feel like the whole thing was a waste of time.

If diction was a genre, Mark Twain would be the father of that genre. Twain writes dialogue in so many different accents that I can't help but commend his talent. However, I believe that, while those accents are great for characterization, they take away from what the novel could be.

I believe the plot could have had much more potential if Twain spent more time with it than he did on diction. The characters are extremely believable, but some of the plot feels like rubbish. For a novel to be good it has to have both a solid plot and believable characters. I think Twain needed to find a bit of a middle-ground.

That being said, Huck Finn is one of the better classic novels that I have read.

(I'll spare you my rant about censoring literature, but if you'd like to read it go here: http://dft.ba/-BSMeyers96 )

(Original Post on October 11, 2011 at: http://dft.ba/-BSMeyers97 )

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