Reality Bites
Why The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn should not be banned A 16-year-old young man watches Jerry Springer as the hostile Ku Klux Klan shout racial slurs at African-Americans in the audience. His mother walks in the room, snatches the remote control all tells him he is not to watch such shows; then, she changes the channel to CNN and watches a black farmer beat a white landowner over a land dispute in Africa. However, as much as the mother tries to cover her sons' eyes and ears, she cannot shelter her son from reality forever because no matter what channel-on television or in life-reality will blow the roof of the shelter that she continues to construct. Similarly, the board of education in California tries to shelter their students as they continue to ban the controversial novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. In his satire, Twain provides students with American History when he exposes the way his society treats African-Americans prior to the Civil War. Cosmopolitan California fears this exposure as the readers! learn about the brutal real world. Comparatively, students learn from Huck's trials and tribulations about their own true morals. Thus, Huck Finn should not be banned from a high
Additionally, readers learn history about the treatment of blacks through Twain's exposure of slavery. Next, Twain exposes how greed can corrupt a person while gullibility can hurt another. If school is the place for one to learn, let thi!s novel educate the students culturally, realistically and morally in their minds, hearts, and spirits. Huck's shameful father, Pap, talks about a well-dressed black professor, "There was a free nigger there, from Ohio. The readers learn that not everyone is trustworthy as Twain uses the "rapscallions" to show how, in the real world, people will take advantage of others for personal gains. Also, through the trials and tribulations of each unique character and his or her actions, the reader's own morals develop to help them become individuals. Huck learns of Jim's enslavement as the novel closes. In the premier of the novel, Huck, confined by society in the house of the Widow Douglass, has the urge to smoke, asks the Widow for permission, but the widow refuses and explains that it was wrong and unsanitary. All in all, as Huck experiences society, he and the reader both learn about the lethal real world. Twain demonstrates through Huck's loss that life will not always go as planned and that events, such as loosing a best-friend, will happen, and sometimes one will have no control over such events. The impecunious "white trash", feels threatened by the successful black man; Pap defensively remarks that this "nigger" should be sold, thereafter his status insecurities turn into social satisfaction. As the "lamentable" duke and dauphin receive sympathy from the townsmen Huck thinks, "Well, if ever I struck anything like it, I'm a nigger. Huck and his adventurous friend, Tom Sawyer, help rescue Jim from slavery, as they are doing so Tom gets shot. It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race.
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