Fictional Biography
Jim's is one of the several spoken dialects called deliberate in a prefatory note. Academic studies include Lisa Cohen Minnick's 2004 Dialect and Dichotomy: Literary Representations of African American Speech and Raphaell Berthele's 2000 "Translating African-American Vernacular English into German: The problem of 'Jim' in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn.".
The character is introduced at the beginning of Chapter Two, seen at midnight by the two boys, Huck and Tom, standing silhouetted in the doorway of the outdoor detached kitchen He hears them approach and inquires into the darkness; he states that he will wait to hear the sound repeated, and he sits at the doorway until he dozes, relieving the hidden narrator's tension indicated by an entire paragraph on an itch unscratched because of fear, of which Jim is unaware. He awakens from dreams of witches (see Richard Dorson's 1956 Negro Folktales in Michigan), and from a nickel left by the boys becomes a storyteller of regional fame, able to command pay for his tales, and in the concluding phrase, all but unfit to be a servant.
His character and perceptions dominate the novel and include spirituality, parental tenderness, and nonviolence: he leaves unmolested two rogues - Jim's term is "rascals" - who have taken over the raft despite their vulnerability as they sleep drunk.
When this character's vision stops carrying the novel - the rogues sell Jim as an escaped slave - the character Tom Sawyer's scenarios take over. Jim's dangerous situation is parodied in a series of clownish pranks that reveal his long-suffering and noble spirit.
Read more about this topic: Jim (Huckleberry Finn)
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“One of the proud joys of the man of letters—if that man of letters is an artist—is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world’s memory.”
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“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
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