MARK TWAIN AND
"THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN"
Mark Twain was born on the Missouri frontier and spent his childhood there. His real name is actually Samuel Langhorne Clemens. At the age of 12 he quit school in order to earn his living. At the age of 15 he already wrote his first article and by the time he was 16 he had his first short novel published. In 1857 he was an apprentice steamboat pilot on a boat that left Mississippi and was leading towards New Orleans. His characters were created because of the people and the situations he encountered on this trip.
"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is a sequel to "Tom Sawyer". "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is one of the masterpieces of American literature. It was first
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That same night they get Jim and run away.
The farmers of the town start shooting them and gets Tom in the leg. They catch them, and Jim is treated bad until the doctor explains that he help him to take care of the boy. When Tom awakens he demands that they let Jim go. Jim is free. Huck find out his father is dead. Aunt Sally wants to adopt Huck but he refuses. Huck concludes the novel stating he would never have undertaken the task of writing out his story in a book, had he known it would take so long to complete.
By using a child as his main character, Twain is able to compare the power and also the vulnerability of a child with the ones of a black slave. The reader can see that they are both in similar positions. Such as: they are both abused, each of them is in the position of losing their freedom and both are at the mercy of white adult men.
HUCKLEBERRY FINN
Being just a boy, Huck does not take his principles and values for granted. Twain shows that conclusions about right and wrong based on experience can mostly be better than the ones based on the rules and laws of the society.
Huckleberry Finn is the main character and also the narrator in Mark Twain's book "The adventures of Huckleberry Finn". Huck is thirteen and he is the son of the local drunk of St. Petersburg, Missouri, a town on the Mississippi River. His father totally disapproves of his son being educated and beats him often. Through the eyes
Mark Twain of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn presents a main character, Huck, an orphan who grew up in an abusive home environment. Huck demonstrates his will to survive in spite of these difficulties through his mental strength and knowledge. His nature, lacking in sophistication or understanding of the world around him, allows him to effectively narrate and also receive admiration from others. Huck’s individualistic, as opposed to conformist, mentality makes him effective at conveying the story’s message.
When Huck stops Tom’s carriage, Tom believes Huck to be a ghost, but once Huck explains the situation, Tom agrees to help Huck. Once Huck and Tom arrive at Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas’ home, Aunt Sally welcomes Huck, whom she had met earlier in the day and believes to be Tom Sawyer, and offers Tom a meal and ride down to Mr. Archibald Nichols’ home. During dinner, “[Huck is] getting a little nervous, and wondering how this was going to help [him] out of [his] scrape, and at last, still talking to along, [Tom] reached over and kissed Aunt Sally right on the mouth” (190). Aunt Sally outraged by this action from a person she believes she does not know as friend or family. Tom continues on to say that people told him that Aunt Sally likes kissing. Aunt Sally, still mad, is confused as to why a stranger kissed her on the mouth. Tom turns to Silas then to Huck, ‘Tom, didn’t you think Aunt Sally’d open out her arms and say, “Sid Sawyer–“’ (191). Tom’s effort to keep Huck safe and to help rescue Jim demonstrates how bold Tom acts, and how, for Huck, Tom would do nearly anything. The fact that Tom willingly lies to his own family proves that even as a follower of society, Tom still has some form of a moral compass. Though much less bold than lying to his own family, Tom participates in the planning of and freeing Jim. To Tom, loyalty is extremely important, so helping Jim is, in Tom’s own standards, less bold. Huck makes a simple plan to free Jim, while the boys use Tom’s plan. According to Huck’s statement, “Well, one thing was dead sure; and that was, that Tom Sawyer was in earnest and was actuily going to help steal that n– out of slavery” (195), Tom dedicated himself fully to help Huck, once again. Tom does write the Phelpses a letter as to warn of the escape plan. This goes against the boldness that Tom presents to Huck in helping to free Jim, but as previously mentioned,
At the the end of the story, there are two details that Mark Twain decides to add in. Jim tells Huck that his father is dead and Tom tells him that Miss Watson passed away two months ago. With both family figures gone and Jim leaving, Huck leaves for indian territory. We can see his reaction to the deaths when the last paragraph for Jim is the one that tells Huck that his dad is dead. The last line of the book says “She’s going to adopt me and sivilize me” giving the last word of what he thinks of society, how there are major flaws in it and why he is leaving it all behind. Huck spent a good chunk of the story trying to free Jim. Now that was over Huck could finally focus all his attention to his personal journey to find a home. Faced with the option to do what he wanted, he decides to finish his journey somewhere where society and its flaws has no influence: indian
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of the great books in America, written by Mark Twain in 1884. It’s a classic. This heart-wrenching, yet, heart-warming story is about friendship, religion, and man against society. The story is about and told by non other than Huckleberry Finn himself. Huck, as most called him is just a boy looking for an adventure and wanting to escape from his cruel, alcoholic father (Twain, Chapter 7). Huck eventually runs away from home, stages his own murder, and goes on the adventure he has always coveted (Chapter 8). He accidentally runs into Jim, continues the adventure with him and they form what will eventually be a very strong friendship. Throughout the book, Huck is at war with himself as to whether he should turn Jim in because he’s a runaway slave, despite the fact that he believes it’s the “right thing to do”.
Jim is a gentle spirited-person and the complete opposite of everyone the people Huck knew who has been surrounded by murderers, lynch mobs, and other shoddy characters. After a lifetime of being alone, and realizing that " he is alone with Jim in the secure little world of the raft drifting down the Mississippi that Huck hears a voice of love that makes sense in the world of hatred, and can reply from his own heart with his apology and with his famous moral victory: "All right, then, I'll go to hell""(Brownell 2). His connection with Jim greatly surpassed the relations with Widow Douglas because of the difference in background and sex. The Widow and Huck could not easily communicate because of many barriers but "With Jim, this barrier of age, position, sex, and background does not exist"(2). Jim’s tenderness allows Huck to reveal his true self and venture into the dark society, with Jim as a symbolization of love and conciliation. Jim is a shining light in the malicious and evil world. Jim's personality is strongly influenced by superstition and bad omens, first appearing when he is giving Huck a prediction by the means of an ox hair-ball. This is followed by Huck meeting his father as he arrives in his room. "Thus enters for the first time a genuinely evil force into the novel, in the form of the malicious and dangerous town drunkard"(2) the origin of Huck’s problems. Huck’s father is the epitome of bad parenting and family failure, the final barrier preventing Huck
In order for Huck to challenge any of the values and assumptions of the time he must first be acquainted with them. And he is not only intimately acquainted with the values of his society but he holds many of its beliefs himself. But Huck longs for freedom away
Mark Twain 's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is a novel about a young boy’s coming of age in Missouri during the mid-1800, is pre-Civil War era. The protagonist, Huckleberry Finn, spends much time in the novel floating down the Mississippi River on a raft with a runaway slave named Jim. On the way to Huck and Jim’s destiny, the two go through many adventures encountering many situations as well as very odd people along the way. Although this novel has adventure and interesting situations, the main focus throughout is the ethical maturity of Huckleberry Finn. The reader gets to see how Huck used to be a child who first questioned authority, but through self-discovery gets to prove himself that he is able to do what he must do in order to create a better world.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain is “A Great American Novel”, because of its complexity and richness. Twain writes dialogue that brings his characters to life. He creates characters with unique voice and helps the reader connect to the book. Anyone who reads it is forced to develop feelings for each character. Even though there is a great amount of controversy over the use of some choices, such as the “n word”, it makes the book more realistic.
Families are the backbone of civilization. The culture and worldview of a civilization are transmitted through families. Often, certain idiosyncrasies, many of which would be considered an abomination in today’s culture, become ingrained in a society. In the antebellum period before the American Civil War, one such idiosyncrasy was that persons of African descent were treated as subhuman. In Huckleberry Finn, Huck realizes the absurdity of these beliefs. When Huck leaves for the western territories, he is leaving behind his family and civilization, along with their deformities. In the end, the light, Huck’s pure heart, overcomes the darkness, his deformed conscience by severing his ties with the society in which he was raised.
Huck goes back to living with the Widow Douglas, a widow that took him into her care after he found all the money with Tom. Huck is living a normal boy’s life but wants to return backs to the woods when one night his dad, who is a crazy drunk, shows up in his room. Huck’s dad began to harass him for some of his money to buy drinks but many of the town folks were on Huck’s side and helped protect him. Eventually his dad kidnaps him and keeps him in a shed that he lives in locked up whenever he goes out. Huck gets fed up with being captive and one day when his dad leaves he stages and fakes his own murder and steals a canoe and goes to stay on Jackson Island, an island in the middle of the Missouri river. The townsfolk go looking for him but concluded he is dead and believe that either his father or Jim ,who recently ran away, killed him. Huck discovers someone else is on the island and finds out it is Jim. They begin to live together and one day discover a house floating down the river after a huge storm. There is a dead body in it and they decide to take what they can from the house and leave. Later Huck goes into town dressed up as a girl and discovers that someone is on the island looking for Jim. He rushes back and both him and Jim begin their float down the river. While floating down the river they run into many thing. In one incident some men come along looking for runaway
Jim’s role is essential to progressing this story through time. Jim’s emotions are exposed and clearly identified for the audience so that the reader connects with him on the most basic of levels; Jim is a human being. Huck also has the ability to expose his true self in the beginning chapters and is speculated to be a blended character with Jim, meaning they are one whole character instead of two while they escape. To show this David Wood wrote, ""The prevailing assumptions in the existing critical literature are that Huck experiences increasing sympathy for Jim as they escape together and that the “evasion” entails the sudden, inexplicable collapse of that sympathy. But a closer look
This book, in my opinion, talked about freedom through the change of attitude towards black slave, Jim. Talking about background, although Twain wrote?Huckleberry Finn?two decades after the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War, America?and especially the South?was still struggling with racism and the after effects of slavery.?By describing the change of attitude towards Jim, Twain reached his target, supporting anti-slavery.
The protagonist Huck undergoes complete moral transformation due to his experiences throughout his course of maturity. Huck first enters the novel as an adolescent outcast lacking religious and academic education. Although his caretakers, Widow Douglas and Miss Watson, try to reform Huck’s independent habits, he was tired of being told how to act. Huckleberry Finn only looks up to Tom Sawyer, a typical middle class adolescent indoctrinated with white social principles. When Tom Sawyer decides to create a group of robbers, Huck is excited to join on Tom’s adventures. However, one of the requirements of a participant is to agree with the murder of a family member if the rules of the gang are broken. Lacking a true family
The adventures of huckleberry Finn is about a boy named huckleberry who lives with Widow Douglas who adopted him and her sister miss Watson. His father is an excessive drinker and was not nice to huckleberry. His father comes back. He wants huckleberry’s money he had gotten previously that was being managed for him. Judge thatcher and Widow Douglas tried to get custody of him but unfortunately the judge does not see it the same way and attempts to help his father quit his ways so he can get his son. After the widow tells him to stay away from huckleberry his father gets angry and kidnaps him. It is after this and a few horrible acts that Huck fakes his own death and escapes to an island in the middle of the river. While there him and Jim who
In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain portrays his main character and the novel’s namesake, a deeply complex individual, even as a child. He has obvious abandonment issues and continues to struggle with finding his place in society. Huck starts by trying to fit in with Tom and a band of young boys, but eventually finds true companionship in a slave named Jim. Huck continues in his struggles as his moral beliefs conflict with the moral beliefs of the society of his time. This conflict comes from Huck being so immersed in a society that he does not seem to belong in, all while still trying to find a place that he does belong.