I like your comment about the effect of modern transportation on language. It’s not just transportation, but communications technology effects language. You and I are communicating in a way that was completely unforeseeable to Twain’s world. I can understand the viewpoint that we’ve lost something important to the English language when reading something like Twain, but I don’t believe this is a bad thing. (Note: You didn’t imply that it was; I’m just adding my opinion.) Language has been constantly evolving; sometimes fast, sometimes slow. “Losing” these accents and variations in language was inevitable, but we would be remiss if that’s all we saw. There are so many new accents, variations, and magical forms of communication available to us. Twain would be jealous. Still, I’m very glad that I can go back and read his work.

This Wikipedia entry ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Mississippi_Flood_of_1927#Political.2C_sociological_and_cultural_effects ) sums it up well — albeit, in a different context: “The aftermath of the flood was one factor in the Great Migration of African-Americans to northern cities. Previously, the move from the rural South to the Northern cities had virtually stopped. In June 1927 the flood waters began to recede, however the interracial relations were too strained to withstand. Hostilities had ruptured between the races; a black man was shot by a white police officer simply because he didn’t want to work a double shift. As a result of displacement lasting up to six months, tens of thousands of local African-Americans moved to the big cities of the North, particularly Chicago, many thousands more followed in the following decades.”

In addition, several people that I’ve talked to about the Great American Novel Challenge happily discuss one or two ‘classics’ they read or re-read years after graduating from high school. Their experiences are much, much better.

I love the idea of thinking of Huck Finn as a road trip. The entire latter half of the book feels so episodic, and thinking of it as a road trip is a wonderful analogy.

Although I mostly agree with your comments, I feel like there’s an element of hope missing. I didn’t leave Huck Finn feeling quite as down as I did after The Sound and the Fury. There’s hope in the way Huck himself changes in the book.

Thanks for the comment!

Huck Finn is easily one of the most misunderstood Great American Novels because so many people think of it as a children’s story. This is a VERY understandable mistake since:

1. It is a sequel to a bona fide children’s story — albeit at a novel’s length; and
2. It ACTUALLY BEGINS as a children’s story.

It is generally considered by most literary critics that Clemens didn’t know where to take the story; and, after removing Huck and Jim (and it should be noted that Huck never actually refers to Jim as “NIgger Jim”) from the Mississippi, that he had set the story aside for a number of years. During this time he had an occasion to travel throughout the South; and what he saw disturbed him. He pulled Huck Finn out from storage and it is from this point onward that the novel demonstrates its greatness; for Clemens will no longer seek to entertain children, but — rather — expose the Southern Condition. In order to do this, he will have his protagonists explore the region; it will be the first American road trip, and the road traveled by them will be that great wide highway known by its denizens simply as “The River”. First they have to get back to the river, however, and in doing so Clemens lets the reader know that this is no longer a children’s story by invoking The Bard (specifically, “Romeo & Juliet”).

The chapters that follow are a veritable catalog of all of the deficiencies of Southern culture (and by the way, it definitively shows through the characterization of Jim just why Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” must be considered propaganda — albeit, very good propaganda); and at the end Clemens has Huck following Horace Greeley’s dictum: “Go west, young man.” Clemens might have added that there was no future to be had in the South; sentiments that would be repeated some 40 years later by a certain young writer in Mississippi by the name of William Falkner. Through the various lives of his Snopes family Faulkner would unfailingly draw a comparison between the post-Civil War and the South of the first-half of the 20th Century; and his message was an obvious one: Go to great industrial cities of the North, for there is no future to be had here in the South.

From Clemens to Faulkner the conclusion is obvious: The more things change, the more they stay the same.