The N-word at the time of Huck Finn

[George Thompson]

 John Baker's post:
>         I seem to recall a later writing by Twain, in which he explained
> that he used the term "nigger," though he knew it would offend the
> sensibilities of some, because a boy like Huck would have used it and,
> indeed, would have known no other.   The implication is that we should
> understand the term to be offensive, but we should not understand the
> uses by Huck and other children to have any offensive intent.
>
relates to a point that, as a reformed English major, I noted in Ron Butters comment "When Twain calls him "Nigger
Jim". . . ."  Mark Twain never uses the word "nigger" in Huck Finn, because Mark Twain does not appear in the book, either as a character or as the narrator.  The story is told in the words and through the sensibility of an ignorant but sensitive 12-year old. What's wonderful about the book is the voice that tells it, Huck's voice.  I've been trying to think of an earlier novel told in this way -- have been, since long before this theme was raised here.  Moby Dick is a first-person narration, but Ishmael isn't naive and doesn't tell the story in a oral-sounding voice.  I don't think that Dickens, or Fielding, or Smollett, or Austen, ever even used a first-person narrator.
As also a reformed reference librarian, I should look this up.  Surely there are studies of the development of first-person narration.

But in any event, the use of the word "nigger" in that book is appropriate to the character of the various figures who use it, and none of them are Twain.
Notice also that except for Jim and Huck and one or two other characters, all the figures in the book are as despicable a crew as have ever appeared in fiction.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

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