Compare Jim in Huckleberry Finn with Frederick Douglass

Compare Jim in Huckleberry Finn with Frederick Douglass

Wieck introduces his analysis of the novel's satire with a discussion about the parallels between Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Frederick Douglass's writings, especially his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself. Slavery tore families apart, shattered dreams, and left African Americans feeling shameful and hopeless. Directly connecting Jim with Douglass to the well educated, "white-shirted, free nigger" derided by pap early in Huckleberry Finn, Wieck argues that several recurrent themes in narrative directly emerge from his association with the outspoken abolitionist. His investigation scrutinizes issues like the scorching satire of Huck's discussion of the status of English servant compared to American slaves, and the slippery ways that places the ideas of "whiteness" and "darkness." Theses compelling examinations of the influences of Douglass, Jefferson, and Lincoln on Huckleberry Finn lend cultural authority to the close readings of the novel that make up the rest of Wieck's book. (Wieck 32).

Wieck throws the authority of these historical American paragons into tension with the cultural authorities from which Huck and Jim spend much of the novel attempting to break free. He portrays Huck's conscientious struggle to accommodate his natural instincts about "rightness" to society's claims for the rightness of slavery, racism, greed, and religion, as a devastating commentary about how far America remains from reaching its democratic potential.

Carl Wieck's preface to Refiguring Huckleberry Finn has perhaps the most unusual opening to a work of criticism in recent memory. He offers a quote from Gerald Posner's Hitler's Children: Inside the Families of the Third Reich, where young Norman Frank, son of Nuremberg convicted war criminal Hans Frank, states that reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn "ruined me for the rest of the Third Reich" by piquing his sense of ...