Friday, January 22, 2010
huck
Ugh. I hate this book. There is something so frustrating about it. I don't feel like it was well thought out at all. Mark Twain has no control over the story. On event follows another and so on and so forth. There is no true excellence or appreciation for the reader. He just drags them down the Mississippi River. He disregards the questions a reader may have and simple gives them a time line of an uneventful and terribly written scenario. Whether it is racist or not truly should have no effect in why it shouldn't be read. It shouldn't be read because the book sucks. Reading a book like " The Handmaid's Tale" where Margaret Atwood is so conscientious of the reader and the connection they make with the characters and then reading a book like "Huck Finn" it is hard to recognize the authors hand in any of it. The reader wants to give Mark Twain their trust but it is difficult to do so when he so flippantly leaves the reader in the wake of his story. Yeah, I hate this book.
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Shanna Mae,
ReplyDeleteI think the comparison to Atwood is a good one for the way in which it allows you to make the argument that, unlike in Handmaid's Tale, the author of Huck has "no control over the story." I think that using Trilling and Eliot's grand claims about the novel being a masterpiece would allow you to set up your counter argument (you could talk about issues they talk about--the "truth" of the novel, its "formal aptness", etc.) and then point-by-point demolish their claims by pointing out scenes and features of the novel that, by your analysis, make it in fact "suck". Smiley ought to be very useful to you as well--if not as a critic to quote from extensively, then as a model of the sort of argument that you seem to want to mount.