Huck Finn Superstition Essay

Through out this novel, Huck and Jim show there ways of superstition. They both have different beliefs. Huck only believes that when he uses his superstition it is only for a good reason. However, Jim's superstition is very strong and can't live without it. In chapter 1, Huck shows he is superstitious when he flicks the spider off his shoulder, it ends up falling in a candle and lighting it. Huck then stood up and went back in his tracks three times and crossed his breast every time. Huck then tied up a little piece of his hair with a thread to keep the witches away, “Pretty soon a spider went crawling up my shoulder, and I flipped it off and it lit in the candle; and before I could budge it was all shriveled up”(3). This makes Huck’s view of superstition very visible. Huck tends to believe things out of fear when something awful is about to happen. Like for instance, in chapter 4, Huck wants to throw salt over his shoulder because he thinks that some of the "bad Luck" will stop following them. During this, Miss Watson, his owner, was there to stop him and tell him that it won't help him one bit, “One morning I happened to turn over the salt-cellar at breakfast.

The book introduces Huck as the first person narrator which is important because it establishes clearly that this book is written from the point of view of a young, less than civilized character. His character emerges as a very literal and logical thinker who only believes what he can see with his own eyes. In this section Huck’s life with the Widow Douglas and her attempts to raise him as a civilized child sets up the main theme of this book which is the struggle or quest for freedom. Huck’s struggle for freedom from civilized society is paralleled by Jim’s struggle to escape from slavery. Irony as a key literary

Thus foreshadowing that helping a slave escape will have its consequences in the future. It also foreshadows that since Jim is now captured, Huck will have to rescue him because they have bonded so much throughout the voyage. Huck then has to struggle with his conscience about returning Jim to Miss Watson so he decides to write a letter to Miss Watson. After Huck wrote the letter he feels like he could finally pray. “I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking–thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell (213).” Then Huck starts to think and he thought about all of the good times that he and Jim had, and that his friendship with Jim is more important. So instead of sending the letter, Huck arrives at his moral decision and decides to tear it up and “go to hell (214).” Huck’s sound mind now tells him that this is a true friendship because Huck has already decided that he will save Jim, no matter what the cost would be.

Although he predicts society will deem him to be "a low down Abolitionist and despise me for keeping mum," he prefers to be shunned and to risk punishment and shame for the sake of freeing Jim (Twain 43). Clearly, Huck's fondness for Jim is evident when Huck intends to send a letter to Miss Watson returning Jim but chooses to rip it to save him instead. Huck responds, "‘I'll right, then, I'll go to hell'- and he tore it up" (Twain 214). Huck accepts his rebellious nature and terrible fate to hell as he escapes from civilized society and into a place driven by his instincts. Jim's desire for freedom puts Huck in a moral dilemma because he must decide whether to follow his innate sense of morality or the restrictive guidelines of society.

In Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a variety of people influence Huck’s ideology. From the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson’s religious rhetoric to Pap’s brutal, uncivilized manner, many contrasting ideas shape Huck’s belief system. However, among these people, Tom Sawyer holds the greatest impact over Huck’s actions and mentality because of Huck’s immense admiration for him. Huck’s initial encounters with Tom Sawyer establish Tom as a major component of the ideology Huck maintains throughout his journey. Despite Huck’s skepticism and confusion about Tom’s imaginative schemes, Huck regards Tom’s judgements as the truth and follows all of Tom’s plans.

He was not as scared of the bad place as he was with bad luck. Maybe Huck did not understand the importance the bad place meant to people. It turns out he was not the only one scared of bad luck, Jim, Huck’s slave, was also not a fan of bad luck.

Widow Douglas is a who takes care of Huck, she is a nice woman who loves and treats him like her son. Huck’s response to the Moses story is changes because in the beginning he was very interested in it and he wanted to know more about Moses until Widow Douglas revealed that Moses had been dead the whole story. After that Huck stopped caring for Moses and his story. What this tells the reader about Huck is that he doesn’t like when things end in death.

Huck says: “Alright, then, I'll go to hell.” when he thought of his friendship with Jim. He finally figured out that Jim is going to be sold down the river so he ended up deciding to tear up the letter that he just wrote. He decided that going to “hell” was better if it meant following his own gut and not society’s hypocritical and rude principles and thoughts is a better plan than going to everyone else’s heaven for doing the wrong thing in his mind. This shows Huck’s big moment with society and the people around him and how they teach people.

Some say that superstition is an impractical way of looking at life but the characters in Mark Twain’s, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn beg to differ. Examples of superstition are abundant throughout the novel. Allowing characters in a novel to have superstitions makes their lives more realistic and the reading more enjoyable. Huck and Jim’s superstitions cause them grief, help them get through, and sometimes get them into trouble in their lengthy runaway journey. Although both of these characters tend to be quite rational, they quickly become irrational when anything remotely superstitious happens to them. Superstition plays a dual role: it shows that Huck and Jim are child-like in spite of their otherwise

Superstition is characterized as “a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation” (merriam-webster.com). Throughout Huck Finn, superstitious beliefs are prominent in many scenes, as well as the development of many character. Within this novel, superstition is used to develop characters through bold senses of belief, along with use of different examples of superstition to allow a thorough sense of understanding in the meaning of a superstitious person. Examples of superstition range from Huck wondering about the dead man and Jim’s response to how he feels about wondering about the man, to Jim’s response to the birds flying overhead and what them flying overhead means, and even Jim’s belief in touching a snakeskin with your bare hands. Indeed, Jim may be the most prominent view of

Dr. T.P.Chia once assured “Superstition is the death of a thinking mind.” This theme is presented in Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, specifically with one character. As Jim and Huck make the journey for freedom, superstition has a heavy response on characters. Jim spills out most of the superstitions, while Huck doesn’t quite seem to agree with some of them. Tom is a dreamer who seems to go along with the superstition world.

In the beginning of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huckleberry encounters multiple examples of religion and superstition, most of which he finds

The criticism of religious ideologies is a common occurrence in Mark Twain’s work, Huckleberry Finn. In fact, the first example of it begins on the second page, during Widow Douglas’s attempt to educate Huck on Religion. “Then she told me all about the good place and the bad place, and I said I wished I was there” (Twain 2). Huck’s blatant rejection of heaven show his childish tendencies and his lack of a religious good will. He is not seeking heaven and therefore is not bound to follow the “greater force” that drives his ethical path.

He like the majority of the Deep South’s population was forced to submit to popular religion in the form of Christianity, being racist and not being able to criticize the institution of slavery, as well as acting like a “proper” boy and being civilized with manors, rules, and restrictions. However, he is the polar opposite of the ideals expressed by his society. Huck is forced to reside with Widow Douglas, he describes the experience in the first chapter, “She took me… allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time … I wanted to smoke, and asked the widow to let me. But she wouldn't. She said… I must try to not do it any more.” (Twain, 2). In this particular environment, Huck is forcefully civilized by the Widow Douglas as well as Miss Watson. This essentially shows an indirect form of slavery in which Huck is forced to do as society and his elders dictate regardless of what he believes in which many of us are also subject to. This enslaves him and leads him to decide that he needs to relocate himself as far away from society as possible. Therefore, he forges his death and runs away meeting Jim on the way. This idea of Huck being controlled by society influences him through the novel, for instance he thinks about turning Jim in because it is wrong to steal since Jim is

Often times Huck found himself in a moral dilemma on whether to do what society instilled in him or to do what he thinks should be done. Huck betrayed those feelings of “what society would want” him to do in order to be a good friend to Jim, putting his own self up at risk again for Jim. Jim was being held captive by Huck’s current host and Huck, abandoning his duties of his superior race and being a good Christian, as the Widow called it Huck suddenly has an epiphany “All right then, I'll go to hell!” as he goes to “steal Jim out of slavery” (212). Seeing the situation through Huck’s perspective it gives the reader every little detail that goes into his thought process in his decision making. These types of actions were considered wrong by society at that time and place but Huck sets that all aside and does what he feels is the right thing. Most of the time Huck has to think on his feet making the decision making process even more difficult, like the time when Huck was going to give Jim up as a runaway slave. “Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on, s’pose you’d ‘a’ done right and give Jim up, would you feel better than what you do now? No, says I, I’d feel bad---I’d feel just the same way I do now” (91). Even through Huck’s dialect you can see him argue with himself on what the right thing to is, but he throws out what society would do and does what his heart tells him. Through Huck arguing