Uluslararası Sosyal Aratırmalar Dergisi The Journal of International Social Research Cilt: 5 Sayı: 23 Volume: 5 Issue: 23 Güz 2012 Fall 2012 www.sosyalarastirmalar.com Issn: 1307-9581 HUCKLEBERRY FINN: A CULTURE-CONFLICTED READING Pyeaam ABBASI* • Hussein Salimian RIZI ** Abstract Dominant readings of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (1885) reveal the writer’s seemingly anti-racist views, depiction of Jim as a character superior to the white characters in the novel and confirmation of the ideology of equality. However, the purpose of this study is a non-dominant or culture-conflicted reading of the novel in order to reveal the hidden layers of meaning in the language employed to represent Jim and therefore, conclude Twain as the product of the racist sentiments of his time viewing blacks as “other.” As a cultural medium and the production of the web of certain discourses of an era, the novel is influential in confirming those discourses and establishing reality. Texts can create knowledge and reality, and each time a statement is repeated the author gains more authority in having it declared. Huckleberry Finn is a highly ideologically conflicted novel, and has aroused a variety of reactions from readers. Most of the reactions are concerned with the way Jim is represented. The novel introduces racism as an ideology as well as a cultural construction making Jim “other” or different. Jim is stereotyped as inferior, passive and dehumanized through language that has the power to construct reality. The language used to represent the black Jim by Twain as a subject of the racist ideologies of his time shapes the readers’ way of looking at the black community and guarantees reliability for readers who take cultural texts as cultural worlds. Keywords: Huckleberry Finn, Language, “Other”, Jim, Ideology. . People make history (meaning) but not in conditions of their own choosing.(Karl Marx) Truth of language is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are. (Friedrich Nietzsche) I. Introduction The bulk of analytic readings of Huckleberry Finn (1885) is vast and diverse. The reason for such various reactions is that each reader is the subject of a certain culture and cultural ideologies that shape his attitudes. The novel seems highly ideologically-conflicted and readers cannot be sure whether Twain condemns the classicist ideologies of the time or reinforces them in the novel. * • Assist. Prof. of English Literature, English Department, Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Isfahan. ** B. A. in English Literature, University of Isfahan.