Huck Finn Argumentative Essay

Throughout the years there have been debates about teaching The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in school. People who want it out of schools think of the Huck Finn as “‘trash and suitable only for the slums’…because it struck them as coarse” (Source D). The people attacking Mark Twains’ work also say that the word “n*****” was abused and because of its overuse high school students are influenced to make fun of black people. On the other hand, the book represents a big part of our history that just cannot be erased despite the controversies. Even though there are many controversies about Huck Finn, Twains’ novel has stayed amongst us because of the history that was incorporated into text. Mark Twains’ personal experiences from the South and from serving in the Confederate army for a brief time, allows “Huck [to be] an enduring character, [who can] represent the best and worst of his time” (Source …show more content…
And by removing the ‘N-word’ from the novel only to replace it with the word ‘slave’ “etiolates the crushing, dehumanizing institutional forces against [Jim, which also] minimizes Huck’s enlightenment” (Source C). Twain uses the ‘N-word’ 219 times in Huck Finn to satirize and to strongly disagree with the Southern morals and viewpoints. Twain’s common use of the N-word as a rhetorical strategy pulls on the readers emotions, which allows Twain to take his audience back to the pre-Civil War era and show how blacks were treated and addressed as back then. And as Twain said about the removal of the N-word, “‘the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter,’” (Source E) and if the N-word is replaced with other words like ‘slave,’ the meaning of the novel would be completely different even though those two word are