Azar Nafisi, the literature critic who wrote that wonderful book The Republic of the Imagination, points out how the slave Jim is the first person who encountered Huck after Huck staged his death in order to escape from his “smothery” world. Huck depends on Jim to show him how to survive on their raft. Nafisi said Jim “resurrects him.” He certainly frees Huck in more than one sense.

Later, when the white mob is after Jim, Huck literally saves or resurrects Jim from a watery grave. They save each other. They help each other to freedom. This is the central relationship in the novel.

This relationship in my mind proves that Mark Twain was right when he said, “Lincoln’s proclamation [when Abe Lincoln proclaimed slavery was abolished]…not only set the slaves free, but set the white man free also. White men were enslaved by a false and wicked ideology—white supremacy—from which they desperately needed freeing. Some have still not been freed.

According to Nafisi, later Huck realizes that “he needs to feel, to empathize with others in order to become more fully himself. All through their adventures Huck finds his own moral compass with the help of Jim. As soon as they meet under new circumstances, Jim is transformed from “Miss Watson’s nigger” to his best mate as they go from “he and I” to “we.”

This is how Huck and Jim free each other. That is a racist and non-racist can free each other. The Adventurers of Huckleberry Finn is a novel about freedom. This is its essential theme. It is a complex book in a simple form. I think it is the greatest American novel and might even be the greatest novel ever written.

In Canada Canadian non-indigenous people urgently need to be saved from their ideology of white supremacy. Allowing indigenous people to liberate themselves would lead to the liberation of non-indigenous people. This is an essential insight we can gain from reading a novel like the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.