preview

Tom Sawyer Vs Huck Finn Analysis

Decent Essays

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Huck), author Mark Twain exposes antebellum society ignorance and exploits the lack of education to his satirical advantage. Twain was adverse to slavery and used the aforementioned problem to comment on slavery in Huck. Twain uses satire on ignorance and the difference between book-smart and street-smart to show that slavery is morally wrong. Twain shows the difference between two characters, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, to illustrate his point. Tom Sawyer represents book-smarts and the educated, “civilized” general population, whereas Huckleberry Finn represents street-smarts and the uneducated, underbelly of the population that nonetheless provides a path to redemption in the southern society. Twain presents Tom Sawyer as a very illogical, dramatic, by-the-book character. Tom believes the stories and tales in book to be equal to the word of God himself. For Tom, everything has to happen exactly as it did in the books he has read or else it is incorrect: “Why, blame it all, we’ve got to do it. Don’t I tell you it’s in the books? Do you want to go to doing different from what’s in the books, and get things all muddled up?” (Twain 19). This rigid belief of Tom’s leads him to act in very illogical ways and gets him into trouble. When Huckleberry and Tom are trying to help Jim escape, Tom makes them do many unnecessary things like make a rope ladder and and inscribe a coat of arms purely because that’s what happened in the books he

Get Access