Why Is Huckleberry Finn Ethically Wrong

1557 Words7 Pages
“I was entranced with the magical journey that Tom and Huck take, as well as Mark Twain’s brilliant weaving of this timeless tale with all of its indigenous flavor. It never occurred to me that certain words were offensive. They were part of the language norms of the era that the book depicted, and so they seemed natural enough,” said Carol Lucas (source 1). Fact of the matter is that Mark Twain was a lyrical and literary genius in the way he wrote all of his pieces. Mark Twain himself said, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” In truth, one word can make a huge difference, and for this reason, Twain wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with every…show more content…
Mark Twain was and still is a literary idol for writers to always look up to, and the way he wrote he even became a political figure in America. To change his work without his permission, legal or not, is morally and ethically inappropriate. Carol Lucas said, “I think that if one is to edit Twain and omit what one might think is unacceptable, then one has to start in Shakespeare, the Roman and Greek comedies, most French and British comedies of the 18th and 19th centuries, and so on. Might as well rewrite all of history” (). Through this quote one can easily see how editing Twain’s masterpiece would be a queue for editors around the world to go and edit every inappropriate word of a dead writer’s work. Editing Twain’s piece of work would open up new arguments to revise ancient art that people would never change, and even some of Shakespeare’s master pieces. It is simply morally wrong to edit and completely change something without its creator’s permission. Moreover, one can see this reasoning behind the New York Time’s quote, “When ‘Huckleberry Finn’ was published, Mark Twain appended a note on his effort to reproduce ‘painstakingly’ the dialects in the book, including several backwoods dialects and ‘the Missouri negro dialect.’ What makes ‘Huckleberry Finn’ so important in American literature isn’t just the story, it’s the richness, the detail, the unprecedented accuracy of its spoken language. There is no way to ‘clean up’ Twain without doing reparable harm to the truth of his work.” This quote clearly shows if Twain were to be alive and see that his masterpiece was being completely reproduced, he would be infuriated and emotionally hurt. Changing his beautiful masterpiece without his permission is ethically inappropriate. As a result, The editors of Huckleberry Finn cannot
Open Document