Huckleberry Finn Audiobook (Unabridged)

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the comic masterpiece of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who trained as a river-boat pilot (from which experience he took his pen-name, Mark Twain). His most famous book describes a boy's journey down the Mississippi aboard a raft with the runaway black slave Jim. Their escapades in the Deep South before the American Civil War are a joy in themselves, but they also direct a searching light on a society where slavery and prejudice are taken for granted and civilization is hypocritical and corrupt.

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"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is as classic as American Literature can get. It set the stage for American fiction, taking a stab at racism with the perspective of innocence and purity. The novel ties in aspects of conformity as well, perpetuating the perfect story about a boy and his toils. I enjoyed reading this novel because of how it portrayed the struggles between blacks and whites, and I found the conflict within Huck intriguing. The forbidden friendship between Huck and Jim symbolized a kind of man vs. self conflict that consisted throughout the story. Huck tried to balance his developing opinions with the traditions and norms of the society that he grew up in. He constantly compared right from wrong and started forming his own opinions based on what he believed, rather than what people told him to believe. I found it refreshing to read about a character making the right choices regarding slavery, instead of following what everyone else did. Too often do we read about the struggles between blacks and whites, instead of the uncommon but lasting friendships that can be formed between the two. Twain succeeds in accurately portraying how people of the time period would have spoken. However, as much as I enjoyed this book, I was not to keen on the vernacular that Twain used, as it was unfamiliar to me and it slowed me down greatly. “’Well, ‘twarn’t no use to ‘sturb you, Huck, tell we could do sumfn – but we’s all right now. I ben a-buyin’ pots en pans en vittles, as I got a chanst, en a patchin’ up de raf’ nights when –‘” (Twain 111). This use of dialect helps to develop the characters and makes each one unique, as each character has a slightly different way of speaking. Jim, the uneducated slave, is by far the hardest character to understand in the novel. Twain focuses mainly on the character development, and not as much on descriptive imagery. One of the themes I identified in this book is the loss of innocence within Huck. He is constantly fighting what is morally right in his own mind versus what is socially acceptable to the people around him. As he develops his personal identity and grows as a person, he sees the value in his independence as a young adult. His whole growth was due to his powerful friendship he made with a socially declared intolerable breed of man, which could be noted as almost satirical for the time period it was based in. Reading the novel in present day, it gives the audience not only a better understanding of American history, but also places them in Huck’s shoes as he chooses his own path and loses the ball and chain that society had locked upon him. Twain’s writing influences readers to make choices for themselves, instead of just conforming to society. He does this by showing the positive effects that can come from following your own beliefs."

— Hannah (4 out of 5 stars)