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Huck Finn And Jim Relationship Analysis

Decent Essays

Individuals do not typically view their friends as inferior, unworthy of their time and of their friendship. The relationship between Huck Finn and slave Jim in the great American novel poses a complex exception to this observation. Mark Twain’s the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn takes place in Missouri, a slave state, around the 1830s and 40s. It centers around our main character, Huckleberry Finn, and the adventures he endures with his close friend Jim, who is a slave. Throughout the harsh physical journey along the the Mississippi River, Huck undergoes deep internal conflict about whether to help free slave Jim, a sin and cruel thing in the eyes of God and society, or return him to his master, the noble thing to do. The existence of …show more content…

While pondering over his relationship with Jim and speculating the morals of a runaway slave, Huck writes, “...I see Jim right before me, all the time, in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, singing, and laughing” (Document B). These are things two friends do and although they are normal, the fact that it is enough to decide to go to hell for him means that Huck truly sees Jim as a friend. Huck’s trip up the Mississippi had begun after he had faked his death to escape the widow Douglas, his hometown, and, most importantly, his father who had kidnapped him and kept him in a log cabin. His father, a drunk, a bum, and an overall embarrassment, never treated Huck in the way a father should treat his son. There was never love in his words or comfort in his expressions towards Huck. It was on the trip up the Mississippi that gave Huck the father figure he needed. In his companionship with Jim, Huck gained a sense of what a father should be like. Jim was evidently loving and kind toward Huck. Huck describes, in Document E, what ways Jim acts that make him happy. It reads, “I’d see him standing watch on top of his’n, stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog...and would always call me honey,

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