{"id":1307148,"date":"2022-02-17T11:03:57","date_gmt":"2022-02-17T16:03:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1307148"},"modified":"2022-02-17T16:07:57","modified_gmt":"2022-02-17T21:07:57","slug":"ben-shapiros-guide-to-huckleberry-finn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/ben-shapiros-guide-to-huckleberry-finn\/","title":{"rendered":"Ben Shapiro\u2019s Guide To Huckleberry Finn"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">12<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fben-shapiros-guide-to-huckleberry-finn%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1307148&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/RP_Huck-FInn_22-1.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" alt=\"image\" \/><\/div>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><em>The following is an excerpt from Ben Shapiro\u2019s Third Thursday Book Club guide to Mark Twain\u2019s Huckleberry Finn. Starting at 8 PM ET tonight, Daily Wire members can take part in a live <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/show\/third-thursday-book-club\">discussion<\/a> with Ben where he\u2019ll answer questions, share his Huck Finn cheat sheet, and break down all the most important themes and characters from the book.&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><span>Mark Twain\u2019s <\/span><i><span>The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn<\/span><\/i><span> is often regarded as the Great American Novel \u2013 the single greatest expression of the American personality in literature. Huck himself is a uniquely American figure: brash yet insecure; entrepreneurial yet lazy; kind yet immoral. He\u2019s a bundle of contradictions, a great enough character to hold an extraordinary variety of shades. But there is one virtue that characterizes both Huck and America above all else: a commitment to truth. Huck may be dishonest, but he\u2019s no liar.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>And because Huck is no liar, he is able to see a truth that those around him refuse to see: that Jim is not just a slave, not just a piece of property, not just a clown or a character in a farce. Huck sees that Jim is a human being, and that Jim deserves to be free. Because of that, we know that Huck deserves our love. And so does America.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>A Short Biography&nbsp;<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span>Mark Twain was born Samuel Clemens in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835. He had five older siblings; his father was a stern man who sought wealth in a variety of endeavors, none of them successful. But Twain\u2019s mother was apparently a far livelier person, and Twain was close with her. When Twain was four years old, his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a city located on the banks of the Mississippi River \u2013 the site of so much of Twain\u2019s writing. In 1847, Twain\u2019s father died. Throughout his childhood, Twain\u2019s family would face abject poverty.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Young Clemens stayed in school until the age of 12. Then he became an apprentice at the <\/span><i><span>Hannibal Courier<\/span><\/i><span>, moving to the <\/span><i><span>Hannibal Western Union <\/span><\/i><span>at the age of 15, working for his older brother Orion. In 1857, Twain began working as a pilot on a steamboat on the Mississippi, but the Civil War meant the end of such trade. He joined the Confederate Army for a brief period in 1861 but deserted. Instead, he went West, prospecting for gold in California. That venture fell through, and so he instead began reporting for the <\/span><i><span>Virginia City Territorial Enterprise<\/span><\/i><span>. It was there that Clemens began using the pseudonym Mark Twain, a steamboat term for marking the depth of the river.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>In 1865, one of Twain\u2019s short stories became a literary sensation. In 1869, he released <\/span><i><span>The Innocents Abroad<\/span><\/i><span>, a travelogue about his travels around the Mediterranean Sea. Then, in 1870, he married Olivia Langdon, a New York scion of a wealthy family. Twain and Livy lived in Buffalo, New York, and had four children.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>In 1876, Twain published <\/span><i><span>The Adventures of Tom Sawyer<\/span><\/i><span>. He quickly began writing <\/span><i><span>The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn<\/span><\/i><span>, but he didn\u2019t publish it until 1884; by that point, he had written <\/span><i><span>The Prince and the Pauper <\/span><\/i><span>(1881) and <\/span><i><span>Life on the Mississippi <\/span><\/i><span>(1883). In 1885, Twain paid a broke Ulysses S. Grant to write his memoirs, perhaps the greatest presidential memoir of all time; the book sold more than 300,000 copies, but that didn\u2019t stop Twain \u2013 a snakebitten businessman \u2013 from bankrupting the publishing house anyway.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Next, Twain published <\/span><i><span>A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur\u2019s Court <\/span><\/i><span>(1889) and <\/span><i><span>The Tragedy of Pudd\u2019nhead Wilson <\/span><\/i><span>(1894). By the time of his death, he was one of the most treasured Americans in public life. But his life was marred by personal tragedy: one of his sons died as a toddler, the couple lost a daughter at age 24 to spinal meningitis, and they lost a second daughter at 29 years old. His sole remaining child\u2019s relationship with him was distant. In 1904, Livy died. On April 21, 1910, Twain followed.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>A Richly Comic Travelogue of The American South<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span>Twain was a master of the travelogue \u2013 he wrote two bestselling travelogues during his lifetime. <\/span><i><span>Huck Finn<\/span><\/i><span> is the third, and the greatest; it is infused with his humor, his scathing commentary. And it takes on the place of Twain\u2019s boyhood: the American South. Twain says in his 1876 preface to <\/span><i><span>Tom Sawyer<\/span><\/i><span>, \u201cMost of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred; one or two were experiences of my own, the rest those of boys who were schoolmates of mine. Huck Finn is drawn from life \u2026. The odd superstitions touched upon were all prevalent among children and slaves in the West at the period of this story.\u201d Twain adds, \u201cpart of my plan has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Twain\u2019s view of the South is deeply skeptical. He sees in it brutal violence, cruelty, and the same sort of Gothic decay spotted by Edgar Allen Poe in his writings. Much of that was due to the innately corrupting character of slavery, as French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville had written in 1831: \u201c[slavery] was the capital fact that was bound to exert an immense influence on the character, the laws, and the whole future of the South. Slavery \u2026 dishonors work; it introduces idleness into society, and with it, ignorance and haughtiness, poverty and luxury. It enervates the forces of the intellect and puts human activity to sleep. The influence of slavery, combined with the English character, explains the mores and social state of the South.\u201d<\/span><span>&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>These themes run throughout <\/span><i><span>Huck Finn<\/span><\/i><span>. Twain investigates the almost-random violence of the American South; its obsession with status and class; its bizarre, contradictory relationship with religion; its acceptance of racism and slavery. Where Twain was an innocent abroad, traveling from Marseille to the Holy Land, Huck is an innocent at home \u2013 and yet he is a perennial foreigner. As a child, he is able to spot the falsities of the society in which he lives and to discover them in himself. And thanks to Huck\u2019s innate virtue, his hatred of lies, his moral sensibility, he is able to rebel against those hypocrisies and evils.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>The Great Evil of Slavery<\/b><\/p>\n<p><i><span>Huck Finn <\/span><\/i><span>is, along with <\/span><i><span>Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin <\/span><\/i><span>and <\/span><i><span>To Kill a Mockingbird<\/span><\/i><span>, the greatest American fictional repudiation of racism and slavery ever set in print. It is therefore highly ironic that the text has been bowdlerized and banned thanks to its use of the word \u201cnigger,\u201d which appears some 219 times in the text. The use of the n-word in the book is, of course, the point: America used to be a place where the n-word was freely bandied about. The complexities of the evolution of the n-word in American life \u2013 from a \u201cneutral descriptor \u2026 quickly freighted with the casual contempt that Europeans had for African and, later, African-descended people\u201d to a full-on \u201cunspeakable obscenity\u201d is a fascinating element of a \u201clarger cultural shift,\u201d as black linguist John McWhorter points out.<\/span><span> But in <\/span><i><span>Huck Finn<\/span><\/i><span>, the point isn\u2019t to praise the use of the n-word, obviously \u2013 the book is a thorough and acidic repudiation of racism. As McWhorter writes, \u201cisn\u2019t showing the open use of the word in the past part of showing how far America has come? \u2026. Black people want their kids to see the real <\/span><i><span>Huckleberry Finn<\/span><\/i><span>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>The <\/span><i><span>real <\/span><\/i><span>Huck Finn is an anti-slavery masterwork.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>It represents a reworking of Twain\u2019s childhood experiences with regard to slavery. Twain\u2019s extended family had held slaves; in his childhood, he had heard stories told by a slave the children called \u201cUncle Dan\u2019l.\u201d In his autobiography, Twain writes of sitting in \u201cUncle Dan\u2019l\u2019s kitchen\u201d between black and white children, \u201cwith the firelight playing on their faces and the shadows flickering upon the walls, clear back toward the cavernous gloom of the rear \u2026 and I can feel again the creepy joy which quivered through me when the time for the ghost story was reached \u2026\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Twain had darker memories, too: he witnessed a slave killed with a piece of slag; he saw an Abolitionist nearly lynched; he witnessed \u201cseeing a dozen black men and women, chained together, lying in a group on the pavement, waiting shipment to a Southern slave-market. They had the saddest faces I ever saw.\u201d<\/span><span> That experience finds its way into <\/span><i><span>Huck Finn<\/span><\/i><span>, too, when Huck witnesses the king and duke selling a family of slaves down the river: \u201cI can\u2019t ever get it out of my memory, the sight of them poor miserable girls and niggers hanging around each other\u2019s necks and crying; and I reckon I couldn\u2019t a stood it all \u2026\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Later on, when Twain got married, Livy took him up to her sister\u2019s farm in upstate New York. One of the women living there was a freed slave, Mary Ann Cord. In 1874, Twain heard her story \u2013 she had been married, had seven children, watched her husband and children sold, and was finally reunited with one of her sons at the end of the Civil War. His dialect-written transcription of her life, titled \u201cA True Story Repeated Word for Word As I Heard It,\u201d was Twain\u2019s first published piece in <\/span><i><span>The Atlantic Monthly<\/span><\/i><span>.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Jim has many of the same characteristics as Uncle Dan\u2019l and Mary Ann Cord: he is a surrogate father to Huck, clever, often wise, self-reflective, tragic \u2013 and yet, in the characteristic full-bloodedness of Twain\u2019s characters, ignorant and superstitious, prone to bouts of foolishness, and even at times cruel. It is clear that Jim\u2019s shortcomings are not purely faults of his own; they\u2019re outgrowths of the society in which he has been enslaved.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Jim has inherent dignity. He believes in shibboleths \u2013 but so does Huck. \u201cJim knowed all kinds of signs,\u201d Huck observes, impressed. \u201cHe said he knowed most everything.\u201d<\/span><span> What Jim knows most of all is the value of freedom: \u201cI\u2019s rich now, come to look at it. I owns mysef, en I\u2019s wuth eight hundr\u2019d dollars.\u201d<\/span><span>&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>But Jim also has practical knowledge. So Huck says, \u201che was right; he was most always right; he had an uncommon level head, for a nigger.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>And Jim is the novel\u2019s only true father. His story about beating his deaf and dumb daughter, not knowing her physical malady, is heartbreaking: \u201cOh, Huck, I bust out a-cryin\u2019 en grab her up in my arms, en say, \u2018Oh, de po\u2019 little thing! De Lord God Amighty fogive po\u2019 ole Jim, kaze he never gwyne to fogive hisself as long\u2019s he live!\u2019 Oh, she was pumb deef and dumb, Huck, plumb deef and dumb \u2013 en I\u2019d ben a-treat\u2019n her so!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>The sense of morality shared by Jim and Huck is the center of <\/span><i><span>Huck Finn<\/span><\/i><span>. They both live in the real world; both live based on a natural love for truth and a peculiar acceptance of what life brings. They live a moral in-between space \u2013 they aren\u2019t criminals or crooks, but they also aren\u2019t rule-obeying churchgoing types. \u201cPap always said it warn\u2019t no harm to borrow things, if you was meaning to pay them back, sometime,\u201d says Huck, \u201cbut the widow said it warn\u2019t anything but a soft name for stealing, and no decent body would do it. Jim said he reckoned the widow was partly right and pap was partly right; so the best way would be for us to pick out two or three things from the list and say we wouldn\u2019t borrow them anymore \u2026\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Huck identifies with Jim because he, too, is an outcast from society, a foreigner in a land not his own. Huck\u2019s father, Pap, is the most obviously racist character in the entire story: he rants openly about the supposed evils of the Missouri government, which won\u2019t sell a free black man back into slavery until he\u2019s been in the state for six months: \u201cThey said he was a p\u2019fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain\u2019t the wust. They said he could <\/span><i><span>vote<\/span><\/i><span>, when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to?\u201d<\/span><span> Pap is a murderous villain, a man who seizes his own son and tries to kill him; Huck has to escape from Pap and fake his own death in order to save his own life.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>But Jim is a surrogate father to Huck. At the beginning, Huck has no idea that Jim cares for him as a father should \u2013 and thus he has no reservations about playing a prank on him on the river. But then Jim disillusions him: \u201call you wuz thinkin\u2019 \u2018bout wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is <\/span><i><span>trash<\/span><\/i><span>; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren\u2019s en makes \u2018em ashamed.\u201d Huck writes, \u201cIt made me feel so mean I could almost kissed <\/span><i><span>his<\/span><\/i><span> foot to get him to take it back. It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger \u2013 but I done it, and I warn\u2019t ever sorry for it afterward, neither. I didn\u2019t do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn\u2019t done that one if I\u2019d a knowed it would make him feel that way.\u201d<\/span><span> Huck\u2019s transition from normal Southern youth to abolitionist begins with the realization that Jim is a full person, not merely a tool to be used.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>As soon as he realizes this, he recognizes that he is in conflict with an entire worldview drilled into him by the society of his youth. Huck begins to feel guilty about facilitating Jim\u2019s dreams of freedom. When Jim tells him that he hopes to escape to freedom and then to purchase his wife and children, Huck responds, \u201cIt froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn\u2019t 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 \u2026. 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 \u2013 children that belonged to a man I didn\u2019t even know; a man that hadn\u2019t done me no harm.\u201d Obviously, Twain is laughing at this absurd perspective \u2013 Jim\u2019s children are his own. But that\u2019s the point, and Huck quickly realizes it: when he is confronted by slave-catchers who question him, he immediately lies on Jim\u2019s behalf. He then adds that learning a morality that would have led him to give Jim up would have made him feel just as guilty as protecting Jim \u2013 so instead, he will follow his innate moral instinct.<\/span><em>&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><i>The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author\u2019s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The following is an excerpt from Ben Shapiro\u2019s Third Thursday Book Club guide to Mark Twain\u2019s Huckleberry Finn. Starting at 8 PM ET tonight, Daily Wire members can take part &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1894031,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1307148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1307148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1307148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1307148\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1894031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1307148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1307148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1307148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}