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A. H.
Huck Finn Research
Mrs. Smith
January 21, 2005
Huck Finn Research Paper: The role of Jim
Thesis: Jim’s role in Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn is not that of Twains subject
of racial ridicule, but that of the moral backbone of the novel, Huck’s friend, and Huck’s
father figure.
Huckleberry Finn has often been labeled “racist” because of the character Jim, the
runaway slave with whom Huck travels up the Mississippi, because of the racial
stereotypes that seem prevalent in Jim’s character and even in illustrations of Jim in the
novel. Actually the opposite is true. The stereotypes so often used to implicate the novel
as racist lend a hand to the anti-slavery message set into the novel by Mark Twain. The
most prevalent of these racial stereotype sis found in the way Jim speaks, “Doan’ hurt
me- don’t! I hain’t ever done no harm to a ghos’”(Twain, pg 53). Jim’s heavy accent and
mispronunciation of words seems to imply that Jim is uneducated and uncivilized and is
one of the main reasons the novel is viewed in this way. However in spite of the
implication that Jim is uneducated and uncivilized he is continually seen to be obviously
morally superior to the characters that are considered “civilized”. The Widow, whose
main task at the beginning of the novel is make certain Huck gets “civilized” , is found to
be hypocritical: “Pretty soon I wanted to smoke. . . . She said it was a mean practice and
wasn’t clean. . . . And she took snuff too”(Twain, pg 15). However Jim is consistently
found to be, “the character closest to the books moral center”(Pinsker, 1989). The use of
racial stereotypes in Huckleberry Finn that are usually cited to criticize the novel were
actually used by Twain to accentuate Jim’s morality as an argument against slavery.
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References
Pinsker, Sanford. "After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?': The Rise of Ethical Criticism,"
Georgia Review No. 2 Vol. XLIII. Summer 1989: 395-405. Literature Resource
Center. Colonial Forge High School Lib., Stafford, VA. 19 Jan. 2005.
<http://galenet.galegroup.com/>.
Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Ed. Thomas Cooley. 3rd ed. A Norton
Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 1999.