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Huckleberry Finn Rhetorical Analysis

Decent Essays

Since the release of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1885, Mark Twain’s novel has been subject to debate over the story’s racial and societal themes. In an era with a growing intolerance for demeaning epithets and culturally degrading undertones, the United States educational network has quarreled over the novel’s place in American schools. Several school systems have banned the book from the classroom, citing that the continuous use of “nigger” and other racist rhetoric in Twain’s prose has engendered humiliation to American racial minorities. These educational organizations have conveyed that the story does not reflect the principles of social harmony and other progressive philosophies that schools are trying to promote. Conversely, others have argued for Twain’s novel to remain a topic of discussion in American schools, claiming that novel’s entertaining storyline and racial burdens are worth analyzing. Supporters of Twain assert that barring the novel from academic settings defeats the entire …show more content…

The harsh tone of the novel provides an example of time to which the nation must not return. The story does incite contentious debate over the representation of African-Americans, but it serves for the advancement of American societal coalescence. In these forums, students have the ability to question Twain’s prose and discourage this dialogue from being a part of the American vocabulary ever again. Without them, no noticeable change occurs. Removing the narrative as a literary classic because of the presence of “nigger” is a limp excuse, as this swiftly oversteps an in-depth discussion of racial history in American literature. This approach seems to intentionally elude development within the classroom by disregarding the African-American community’s dark, yet relevant history. Conversations about race are inherently discomforting, but overlooking them obstructs progress and fosters an ignorant

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