" There never was
a more easy-going, care-free, unpuritanical lot than Huck and Jim, the
two farcical "hoboes," Tom Sawyer, and the rest. And yet in the light
of Mark Twain's later writings one cannot but see in that picaresque
romance, with its pleasingly loose moral atmosphere, an underlying
seriousness and conviction. Jim is a simple, harmless negro, childlike
and primitive; yet, so marvellous, so restrained is the art of the
narrator, that imperceptibly, unconsciously, one comes to feel not only
a deep interest in, but a genuine respect for, this innocent fugitive
from slavery. Mr. Booker Washington, a distinguished representative of
his race, said he could not help feeling that, in the character of Jim,
Mark Twain had, perhaps unconsciously, exhibited his sympathy for and
interest in the masses of the negro people.
Indeed, to the reflective mind--and it is to be presumed that by that
standard Mark Twain's works will ultimately be judged--there is no more
significant passage in Huckleberry Finn than that in which Huck
struggles with his conscience over the knotty problem of his moral
responsibility for compassing Jim's emancipation.
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