Huckleberry Finn Flashcards
The Problem of Freedom, Sanford Pinsker
Twain wanted to tell “nothing less than what freedom in America means”
“the biggest lie of all is that anyone, black or white, could be genuinely free”
“Pursue it as Huck will, freedom remains an elusive promise, one that F. Scott Fitzgerald would later characterize as the boats that forever recede into the past no matter how hard one paddles”
“Freedom, for these folks [Duke and King] consists of inflicting as much cruelty as they can”
Sanford Pinsker, Romanticism
“romanticism of the sort behind the blood-curdling oaths taken by would-be members of Tom Sawyers gang is one thing; when it generates the ongoing feud of the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords, however, this is another matter altogether”
“[Huck] is the satiric lens through which we see the world’s endless capacity for cruelty”
Leslie Gregory, Jim
“[many felt Jim’s characterisation was] insensitive to African American heritage and personally offensive in racially mixed classrooms”
“Southern white society still looked upon them as sub-human creatures without souls or feelings”
Huck “acknowledges Jim’s feelings and his humanity by apologising to him”
“Nowhere in the novel is Jim’s humanity more apparent than when he offers the ultimate scarifice= his freedom- to save Tom’s life”
Tom Quirk, Huckleberry Finn & Mark Twain
Sam Clemens “knew the lower Mississippi like the back of his hand”
“Huck is running away from a brutal father and Jim is running away from the impending possibility that Miss Watson may sell him down the river”
“our appreciation of this novel certainly profits by some acquaintance with Twain’s biography”
Elizabeth Gifford, Jim
“frightened slave who is running away from a greedy old woman”
“Huck feared for his life is he stayed with his father, and he feared for his way of life if he returned to the widow. Escape he must”
“used Huck for his own purposes while he loved and cared for him”
Devoto, Mark Twain
“the human race whose cruelty was the strongest pressure in Mark’s discontent”
Lionel Trilling, Jim & Huck
“in Jim he finds his true father”
Points out how Jim contributes to Huck’s moral testing and development
