In her essay, “Say It Ain’t So, Huck: Second Thoughts on Mark Twain’s ‘Masterpiece,’” Jane Smiley greatly critiques the characters in Mark Twain’s novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and questions how it ever came to be considered a great American novel. Personally, I agree with Smiley on many different accounts but there were a few places where our views of the book differed. I do agree that Huck Finn has no place in classic American literature as it is not quite as brilliant a novel as it’s made out to be but I feel that people, Jane Smiley included, take their analysis of the novel much too far.
The first of Jane Smiley’s arguments that I agreed with was questioning how in the world Huck Finn ever came to be considered the “novel that all American literature grows out of” according to ___________. Smiley wonders how this book can even be considered a serious novel, never mind it being a masterpiece and I completely agree. Reading this novel felt to me like reading a children’s book in a southern dialect. It did indeed involve issues that I would not deem appropriate for a children’s book but the adventurous twists and turns of the plot seemed that of a book to be enjoyed by a ten year old.
In her essay, Smiley brings up the fact that Twain seemed to be having a difficult time matching the ending to the original plot.
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