When reading My Jim after reading Huck Finn it is safe to say that Mark Twain would wholeheartedly approve of Rawles literary work. All of the books we read are so based on surviving and then writing down a story and I don’t think that My Jim is any different in that way. Sadie is telling her story to Marianne and in the beginning Marianne is our narrator and at the end of the section she’s narrating she says, “And at the end of the telling I knows what to do” (Rawles, 2005, 18). When she says this the little note I made was that Marianne was going to write it down. She would listen to the story and then write it all down. And even though she may have literally been referencing that she knew what she would do in her own life, there is also room to read it as a form of acknowledging the story.
The novel uses the objects such as Jim’s hat, Sadie’s knife, her mother’s bowl, her daughters button and so on to form a narrative and to tell different parts of her own story. Sadie then ties the story together with the making of a quilt for Marianne that will have all these things in it. Tying together the story with physical aspects almost adds to the believability of the story.
In Huck Finn we get a tale that includes slavery but it is not about slavery. It is a book focused on the friendship between two very different and/or similar characters. It may seem going into My Jim that the story would be set around Jim and Sadie but we end up with a novel about the hardships of a woman rather than a tale about a relationship.
When reading Moby Dick and Ahab’s Wife I quickly jumped back to Melville’s tale because it is just well written and it sticks with you. Twain is an excellent satirical writer and presents a wonderful adventure tale, but Rawles comes in and adds more to the story than one could hope to receive.
