In five pages this paper compares these two slave novels and examines how Flight to Canada was regarded as a cynical parody of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Three sources are cited in the bibliography.
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during the heart of the slavery conflict between the northern and southern tier of the United States. The conflict became so heated, it eventually escalated into the War Between the
States. Held up by the abolitionists as the anti-slavery bible, Uncle Toms Cabin explained, in black and white, everything that was unjust about the institution of slavery through the beating
death of one slave and the successful flight of another to Canada. A little more than 100 years later, however, after the Emancipation Proclamation was written, after civil rights and
affirmative action, writer and poet Ishmael Reed, still convinced that African Americans lived in slavery (although not under the whip, necessarily, of an overseer), wrote a hard-biting, sarcastic and cynical
novel, Flight to Canada. Released in 1976, Flight to Canada was Uncle Toms Cabin brought to the 20th century. It embraced the same concepts of Uncle Toms Cabin, yet the
characters, the endings - and even the motivation behind writing the works - were about as far apart as the century these two works spanned.
On the surface, Stowes motivation for writing Uncle Toms Cabin was to literally shame society into acknowledging the story and plight of enslaved African Americans. What
many readers didnt realize, however, was that Stowes almost melodramatic story-telling style hid a biting, sarcastic tone -- the book abounds in examples of supposed "Christian" men who mistreated, beat
and even killed other human beings, simply because the color of their skin was different (Heubl-Naranjo 367). In one scene of the
book, while Tom travels on a southbound boat to be sold to another plantation, "Stowe contrasts his simple, supposedly ignorant views in an attempt to shame those who hold more