Huckleberry Finn: Journey Of Initiation

Huckleberry Finn is a great American novel. Yet this same novel, so highly influential and much admired by writer and reader alike, has been one of the most controversial and frequently banned books of American literature. However, the majority of contemporary reviewers and later commentators on Mark Twain found the novel praiseworthy: there is no need to give the details of Hemingway's famous commentary on the book in his Green Hills of Africa (1935); the famous literary critic H. L. Mencken announced,"I believe that'Huckleberry Finn'is one of the great masterpieces of the world, that it is the full equal of'Don Quixote'"(qut. in Inge 376). Many works of study about this novel have interpreted it from many different angles since its first publication in 1884.In 1940s, the problems in the course of the adolescent growing-up in American literature attracted the attention of American scholars, and so the study on the initiation theme in literary works sprung up. Adolescence is a key period that everyone has to experience in their life; adolescents in different times have different puzzlements. Therefore, initiation is a literary theme full of novelty and vitality forever. In fact initiation stories have a centuries-old tradition in Europe as well as in America. And Huckleberry Finn is generally acknowledged as a classic initiation story in American literature.There are also many studies on the initiation theme in the book in literary criticism at home and abroad. Most of them made analyses, simple or complex,...