Ewen Wang
In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain targets Southern selfishness and ignorance by ironically imposing cruel treatments on Jim’s compassionate and logical character, supporting his goal to satirize racism.
Twain embeds his criticism of racism in Jim’s human characteristics and cruel fate in order to avoid denunciation himself. Early in the novel, Huck and Jim debate about whether the French talk the same way. Huck does not think so, but Jim convinces him otherwise by contrasting a cow with a cat, and comparing a Frenchman with a man. Then he says “Dad blame it, why doan’ he talk like a man?” (Twain 60). This seemingly silly debate serves as an outlet for Twain’s message that people of all heritages should be equal. Through Jim’s simple logic, Twain demonstrates the unreasonable nature of …show more content…
Jim’s frustration, conveyed through “Dad blame it,” shows his weariness of being a slave and that with minimal logic, the foolishness of racism can be exposed. After Jim is sold to the Phelps’s, Huck meets a boy who thinks the reward for capturing Jim is “like picking money off the street” (159). The boy’s fascination of exploiting Jim’s freedom for his own welfare shows that Southern greed is so prevalent that even children have inherited it. According to Jane Smiley, “Twain really saw Jim as no more than Huck’s sidekick” (357). However, her argument is misleading since “given the subtlety of Mark Twain's approach, it is not surprising that most of his contemporaries misunderstood or simply ignored the novel’s demystification of race” (Smith 374). Smiley overlooks Jim’s importance by