This goes for Huckleberry Finn as well. These days, it's legitimately a really hard read because of all the…stuff. Including not only the slur all over the place, but the rendition of accents (which feels mocking to a modern reader)*, the casual racism that everyone displays—
But if you look at it through different eyes, you start seeing something extraordinary in the way this rough outcast boy stumbles into a found family with Jim, who is literally the nobleist person in the book. The slurs and the racism slowly turn into a vicious critique of the entire society, rotted to the core with hypocrisy, contempt, hatred, and the evils of slavery—"nice" people who go to church think nothing of beating a slave, or shooting them if they try to escape, while here is this ragged delinquent lowlife, Huck, who is not only willing to defy society for the sake of Jim and what's right—he's willing to defy God, too. He's been told all his life that God wants slavery, wants society to be this way—well, God's wrong. He faces his dark night of the soul, considers turning Jim in, then says, "All right, I'll go to Hell," and rips up his confession. Whatever consequences it brings—bring them on.
None of which means that a person has to read it if they don't think they can handle it, because like I said—it's a hard read. I kind of think it may have been a hard read at the time, though, but for different reasons: because Mark Twain was saying to society, "Yes, you're the asshole. Sit with it a while and get more uncomfortable. Actually, more uncomfortable than that. Uncomfortable enough to change a thing or two."
And that, by itself, earns the book its place among the classics. The simmering anger of a very good writer out to indict the world, and by doing so, maybe make things a little bit better.
* Okay, so at the time, accent-writing was considered something an author just did, and the better they did it, the better an "ear" they had. Prejudicial then and now? Yeah, okay—but I guarantee nobody would have thought of it. And I once introduced Huckleberry Finn to a group of kids up in a remote, rural county in Tennessee,** white and maybe one Melungeon kid, and they all agreed that Huckleberry Finn "talked like people," in contrast to characters from most books who "talked like TV," and that they would have much more fun doing their reading if all books were written like that. All of which to say is that I feel like the white Southern accent was probably pretty on-point, if some kids with an entirely different Southern accent*** thought that it was close enough.
** Did it take some doing to find a passage without a slur in it? Yes. Yes it did. And we had to have a class discussion about that, too.
*** Look, the Appalachian accent is not the same as Mississippi Southern accent, and I rarely hear it done correctly on TV, and these kids had it strong enough to cut glass. If you want to know what it sounds like, take a look at this guy—he is offensive in spots but frankly I think he makes a few good points too:
