Smiley Makes Me Frowny: The Crucial Flaws in Jane Smiley’s Criticism of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn First of all, I cannot even begin to begin my essay without bringing up how irrelevant Jane Smiley’s introduction is. “So I broke my leg. Doesn’t matter how-” (page 354). If it doesn’t matter how, then it doesn’t matter to the rest of criticism. Smiley does not compare the pain of her broken leg to the pain of reading Huckleberry Finn (though one could argue the pain of a shattered tibia is comparable to suffering through her analysis); she uses it as a build-up to why she read Huck Finn. Now that I’ve finally gotten that off of my chest, let’s begin with the actual criticism of her criticism. “The novel took me a couple of days, and
