Why Should Huckleberry Finn Not Be Banned

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been one of the most controversial piece of literature since since its publication in 1884. Written by Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain, it tells the story of a boy in his early teens named Huck Finn. In an effort to escape his abusive father, Huck fakes his own death and escapes in a canoe on the Mississippi River. There he meets up with the escaped slave of Ms. Watson’s, Jim who eventually becomes a surrogate father to Huck. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn shows Huck’s moral development, as it ebbs and flows like the Mississippi river he floats down. First denounced by the Concord Public Library Committee on the grounds of being “flippant, irreverent, and trashy.”, it is now being banned on the basis of racism. The book has gone from immoral trash to racist trash. The Adventures of Huck Finn should not be banned because it shows the

While Huck doesn’t fully realize it at the time, he reveals a key contradiction.

Jim talked … how the first thing he would do when he got to a free State he would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent, and when he got enough he would buy his wife … and then they would both work to buy the two children, and if their master wouldn't sell them, they'd get an Ab'litionist to go and steal them.

It most froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn't ever dared to talk such talk in his life before. Just see what a difference it made in him the minute he judged he was about free. … Here was this nigger, which I had as good as helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children -- children that belonged to a man I didn't even know; a man that hadn't ever done me no harm. (Twain 88)

Here Huck is saying that Jim’s children are owned by someone else, while being Jim’s (possessive) children. Twain is pointing out that this makes no sense; Jim’s children aren’t