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4 Articulating Jim Language and Characterization in Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain's Adventures ofHuckleberry Finn (1884) remains an icon of American literature in part because of its standing as a flashpoint for debates about art and about politics, especially the politics of race, in American life. While no single analysis can hope to address every level of complexity embodied in the novel itself as welLas in the discussions and debates surrounding it, it is possible to add an interesting dimension to the discussions of race generated by Huckleberry Finn, specifically in this case with respect to the character ofJim, using the methods described in the previous chapter. In response to the persuasive interpretations of Eric Lott, Toni Morrison , Frederick Woodward and Donnarae MacCann, and others who conclude that Jim is represented negatively and stereotypically, this chapter explores the characterization of Jim through an analysis of his speech as represented by Twain. The procedures used, as outlined in chapter 3, combine a quantitative linguistic inquiry with a more traditional critical approach in an attempt to determine how representations of speech can be used in characterization in general as well as in the characterization of Jim in particular. As discussed in chapter 3, the quantitative approach allows for an empirical analysis of the actual language used, while the qualitative critical approach makes it possible to keep in mind the artistic value of the work. As a novel long noted for the complexity of its themes, Huckleberry Finn not only lends itself, but also demands that attention be paid, to the relationships among its artistic, linguistic, and even political intricacies. One of the great contradictions in Huckleberry Finn is in its interpretation as social commentary. For some readers, it is a manifesto against racism, culminating in the scene in which Huck chooses his friendship with Jim over what he believes to be the well-being of his own soul. It is hard to argue that Twain is not in fact making such a statement in light of the power of that scene. On the other hand, critics such as Morrison, Lott, and Woodward and 60 / Language and Characterization in Huckleberry Finn MacCann point to what they view as Twain's frequent lapses into stereotype in his formulation of Jim's character. The question arises as to whether it is possible for a work that in many ways attempts to take an antiracist stance also to contain unexamined racial assumptions of its own. A more recent analogy may help to illustrate this dichotomy as well as to introduce the main part of the discussion. The example comes from a 1969 New York Times article about poverty and hunger in the rural South. The story profiles Dr. Donald Gatch, a white South Carolina physician who was forced to leave his job at Beaufort County Memorial Hospital when his reports of serious malnutrition among Mrican Americans living in poverty in South Carolina were met with hostile skepticism by his white colleagues and patients. It is surprising today to read this decades-old feature story that describes, without exactly naming , the deep denial in which much of middle-class white America was then apparently mired with respect to the existence of poverty and hunger in the United States. Dr. Gatch was the subject of a statement signed by every other white doctor in Beaufort County condemning what they called his "unsubstantiated allegations," insisting that the "rare cases of infant malnutrition " in Beaufort County were the result of "parental inexperience, indifference or gross neglect" (qtd. in Bigart 1:1). Dr. Gatch's white patients responded to his carefully documented and easily verifiable reports of widespread hunger and disease with a permanent boycott.1 The Times attempts to explain: Chronic hunger seems so remote in this bounteous land that reports of extreme malnutrition among Negroes in the rural South, among migrant farm workers, among Mexican-Americans and reservation Indians have been set down as exaggerations and lies, the observers frequently assailed as charlatans or do-gooders who would sap the initiative of the hungry poor by expanding "giveaway" Federal food programs . (Bigart 1:1) The article reports but does not challenge the questionable basis for the widespread denial of Dr. Gatch's observations. The belief that hunger could not possibly exist in a land of plenty is unconvincing and illogical in its failure to consider unequal access to food and other resources. Such inequality exists, of course, regardless of the overall abundance of resources and is apparent in the...

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