Below find journal topics, a quiz, and an essay assignment designed to deepen students' appreciation of Twain's satire and the controversy that has swirled around it for more than a century. In the essay students will weigh in on the controversy by "defending, challenging, or qualifying" a literary critic's conclusions about teaching the novel (a task that they are asked to do on numerous current writing assessments).

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Reading Assignments and Suggested Journal Topics

(originally created for an 11^th grade class in American literature)

Assignment #1: Chapters 1-7

Huck’s language

Huck and Tom’s friendship (How are they alike? How are they different? What experiences have made Huck different?)

Huck’s search for a father

The river (its literal and symbolic significances)

Assignment #2: Chapters 8-16

Huck and Jim’s relationship (How are their lives parallel? How does Jim act as a surrogate father for Huck?)

Huck’s growing maturity

His moral crisis over slavery

Assignment #3: Chapters 17-22

What is Twain satirizing in the Grangerford-Shepherdson episode?

What is he satirizing through the Duke and the Dauphin?

Try writing your own parody

Assignment #4: Chapters 23-33

Sources of humor in the Wilks episode (Do any recent movies or tv shows come to mind?)

Huck’s decision to “go to Hell”

Assignment #5: Chapter 34-end

Tom and Huck’s efforts to free Jim (a satisfying or frustrating conclusion to the novel?) Is the book an American bildungsroman (novel of education)? Which characters change? How?

As possible Journal topics, these are obviously very broad and would best be narrowed down (to a specific incident, interaction between characters, even passage or line). As we discuss Twain’s work, we will also be examining materials on the century-old controversies over the novel, which some school districts have even banned.

Quiz: Important Moments in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (last third)

Identify two of the following quotations, one from Group A and one from Group B. Most are said by Huck. Briefly explain the context (Whom is the speaker addressing? At what point in the plot?) and significance (What does the quotation add to the reader’s understanding of characters and/or themes?) Write in complete sentences.

Group A

1. “These uncles of yourn ain’t no uncles at all; they’re a couple of frauds—regular deadbeats. There, now we’re over the worst of it, you can stand the rest middling easy.” (182)*
2. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it, I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up. (207)
3. “We blowed a cylinder head.”

“Good gracious! Anybody hurt?”

“No’m. Killed a nigger.”

“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.” (213)

1. Well, it made me sick to see it; and I was sorry for them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed like I couldn’t ever feel any hardness against them any more in the world. It was a dreadful thing to see. Human beings can be awful cruel to one another. (223)

Group B

1. “I’ll help you steal him!”
2. I knowed he was white inside, and I reckoned he’d say what he did—so it was all right now, and I told Tom I was a-going for a doctor. (263)
3. “Old Miss Watson died two months ago, and she was ashamed she ever was ever going to sell him down the river, and said so; and she set him free in her will.” (276)
4. “Nemmine why, Huck—but he ain’t comin’ back no mo.’ ” (279)
5. But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it, I been there before. (279)

*I believe the page numbers refer to the Oxford World’s Classics edition.

Should The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn be Banned? In-class Essay

The following excerpt is from the essay "History, Slavery, and Thematic Irony" by Richard K. Barksdale, a biographer of Langston Hughes and expert on African-American literature generally. In the essay he addresses the controversy over Twain's classic novel. Read the excerpt carefully and write an essay that defends, challenges, or qualifies Barksdale's point of view. Refer to specific incidents from the novel in developing your ideas.

Given the social and cultural conditions that existed in pre-Civil War America, Twain sought to explore the ironic possibilities of the development of an authentic black-white friendship. Under what circumstances could a slave and a white man develop a friendship in slave-time America? Could it occur within the system, or would it have to be a clandestine matter hidden from society at large? Twain, the ironist who doubted that social and/or moral benefits could accrue from a civilization beleaguered by greed and prejudice, concluded that, given the nature of slave-time America, a friendship of that kind could develop only outside the normal areas of civil and social discourse. In fact, Twain seems to suggest, with more than just an ironic gleam in his eye, that such a friendship could develop only on a socially isolated raft in the middle of the nation's biggest and longest river, and thus as far from the shores ruled by law and order as a person could get in middle America. . . .

So, although Jim's roots lie deep in the soil of slavery and American racism, although his is an honest and forthright portrayal of a slave runaway, and although young black teenagers are traumatized by reading about the Jims of slavery time, the great difficulty with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is that it is one of America's best pieces of ironic fiction. To a nation that was and is sharply divided on matters of race, Twain's novel suggests that friendships between black and white can best be forged by the least of us, and then only under the worst of circumstances. Undoubtedly, only a reading audience of some maturity and perceptive insight--an audience that can probe for lurking truths under surface facts and figures and events--can grasp the far-reaching implications of the adventures of a white Huck and a black Jim floating down the river of American life.