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Examples Of Hypocrisy In Huckleberry Finn

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One time Laura was talking to her father about how good of a person her grandfather was. With a stern, yet soft, look on his face he told her: “Your grandfather is not the same father I knew. Right now he is the man who wants to get into heaven”. In the novel Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, one of the main themes is religious hypocrisy and how it affects the characters and their journeys. Ms. Watson is a great example of religious hypocrisy. She is the sister of Widow Douglas, who adopts Huck after several problems with the court and his father. Ms. Watson is always talking to Huck about the church and religion, but she never fully explains it to him. She is a wealthy, old woman who is a good owner to many slaves, including Jim. Jim is a black man who always puts his family first and risks everything in order to stay close to them. Ms. Watson made a promise to Jim that she would never sell him so that he could stay with his family. Jim and Huck go in an adventure and when they return to Huck’s hometown, Tom tells them that: …show more content…

In the eyes of the church, Huck is doing the wrong thing by freeing Jim from the cruelty of slavery. Ms. Watson tries to teach Huck that he should pray and follow the religious values of the church: “Here she was a-bothering about Moses, which was no kin to her, and no use to anybody, being gone, you see, yet finding a power of fault with me for doing a thing that had some good in it” (Twain, ). Teaching an uneducated child about religion is hard, and teaching Huck is harder. Here, we see how Huck struggles with the principle of learning from the past. He doesn’t understand the idea of studying history in order to improve himself. Ms. Watson gives a lot of importance to Christianity. That is the reason why she frees Jim in her will. Before Ms. Watson died, she may have realized one of two things: slavery went against her beliefs or breaking her promise to Jim went against her

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