Huck Finn: Mark Twain drops the N-bomb

I find it quite amusing that some of the criticisms were centered around his use of the n bomb and made it into a huge controversy. I don't think that it's serious because the book isn't a racist book; it's simply depicting what life was like back in the south when slavery still existed: raw and unedited. Afterall, we should experience history just as it is and not sugar-coated. Even history books can be bias. We're socially conditioned to think certain things and I think that was most of what Twain was depicting in Huck Finn. Huck, as a child, is questioning the social dogma around him because he's been condition to think that blacks are second-class citizens and the aspects of religion, specifically Christianity. However in the end, he's unwilling to accept that and I think that's what makes the book great. Accept things that you like and not what you're forced to. 

My favorite criticism would be T.S. Eliot's. He explicitly states certain aspects of the book I didn't clearly understand or knew during the book. Most of all, he talked a lot about how the book was influenced by Twain himself. Also, when many of the criticisms judged Twain or rather, Huck Finn, Eliot simply states that Twain was just writing from the vantage point of an observer. He allows us to judge for ourselves whether the book was good or bad; he was objective in his book's depiction of the antebellum south. Eliot also talks about the river as an archetypal device and Huck and Jim in relation to another. While many other critics talk about each other as separate entities, Eliot believes that they were ultimately one entity in the sense that the two of them formed the book and they would be incomplete without each other. Eliot forms a rather sympathetic view on Jim because he's been through so much "bear, and bear along, the responsibility of a man."