Literature
“Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.”
― Touch Magic: Fantasy, Faerie & Folklore in the Literature of Childhood
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
“What’s the use you learning to do right when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?”
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
This important work of American literature has challenged us to think about life in a different way. The book is written from Huck Finn’s perspective: Huck is a boy who lives independently and is frequently homeless. His father is a drunk who disappears for months and does not care for the boy. As he lives apart from mainstream society, he is suspicious about the ways the society thinks.
For example: Although against the law, it seems correct to him to help Miss Watson’s slave, Jim, to run away and become a free man.
Another example, Huck finds out, when he and Jim meet a group of slave-hunters, that telling a lie is sometimes the right course of action.
Huck has an ability to think through a situation in its own context what gives him ideas of right and wrong that do not agree with the socially acceptable. That’s when he says:
“What’s the use you learning to do right when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?”
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Mark Twain, in Huckleberry Finn, was the first American author to use Southern Vernacular, and this opened doors for many other authors to use local dialects in their work.
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See beside the humorous NOTICE and the EXPLANATORY that Twain wrote in the beginning of the novel:
NOTICE
PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR,
Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance.
EXPLANATORY
IN this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary “Pike County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.
I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.
THE AUTHOR.
HUCKLEBERRY FINN