During the Socratic seminar we mainly talked about the controversial language in the novel Huckleberry Finn. Genevieve talked about how we automatically censor our speech when we quote lines from the book. I know that’s because we are not comfortable saying some of the things Mark Twain said in the novel. That is because times have changed.
During the time of this novel they had not been changed. People acted exactly like those people in the story did. Mark Twain wanted the people pf that time period and now to see how wrong that was. He wanted to stand up for the people who were being treated unfairly. The only way to do that is to speak the truth and that is exactly what Twain did. If you alter the book it is like removing truth and history. If the words were removed and replaced the book would loose part of its essence of truth and unfair treatment. If publishers published new versions of the story, the people who read those versions would probably not see as much of the cruelty Mark Twain meant for us to see. Quite honestly, if I read a censored version of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn I would just see it as a little boy’s adventures out of curiosity. I would just see a strange little boy breaking into bible studies and building rafts and I would completely miss the mob mentality and human cruelty references. If that happened it would totally defeat Mark twains whole purpose and reasoning behind writing the novel.
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