The Voice

I can’t help to notice the negative connotation an African American ethnicity still has regardless the efforts to avoid it. Anthony DePalma publishes in his article A Scholar Finds Huck Finn's Voice in Twain's Writing About a Black Youth Professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin comparison between Huck Finn’s voice with Twain’s servant, a black 10-year-old boy, arguing that they are almost identical. The novel’s importance seems to decay if the voice of the narrative indeed resembles or copies a boy servant. It would infer, based on “Hemingway's line that 'all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called "Huckleberry Finn."’”, that American English roots from African American of the late 19th century, which creates controversy.

Slavery and African Americans are obviously one of the main themes in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But I agree with Twain’s supporters that his language is satirical, not degrading to the African American but more defendant of them, in contrast to his society. His protagonist does everything in his power to protect and hide Jim even though he is expected to be treated as an object and not a man. Surely the novel caused disagreements when published and it still does with this new hypothesis about Huck Finn’s Voice coming from a black boy.

I believe Professor Fishkin’s argument is very likely to be right. The voice undoubtly is a kid’s voice and thought, naïve and uneasy, his vocabulary isn’t sophisticated and even childish in some ways, if I were to see the evidence that Professor Fishkin provides I would be easily convinced of its resemblance with the boy. American language was influenced by Twain’s novel, there is no way back. Whether it came from Twain’s head or from Twain’s servant makes no difference, either way a big percentage of American are African American so their way of speaking has shaped modern English.

I can’t help noticing also the change in DePalma’s voice within the article. I know this has little to do with my previous argument but it caught my attention. The introducing paragraph tries to copy Twain’s child voice: “You don't know about this without you have read a book by the name of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"; but that ain't no matter.” That is how the actual novel begins, (but ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ instead), and he goes on with the same tone next sentence: “Mr. Mark Twain wrote it and he got considerable praise for using a boy's voice to tell a tangled story about race and about America and nobody kin say for sure where that voice come from.” The tone is recognized because he uses three times the conjunction ‘and’, uses ‘kin’ instead of ‘can’ and the fact that the sentence is long, like a kid spilling rapidly out everything he wants to say at once. Then the tone gets more formal and less Twainish. Just pointing out.