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What Do Clothes Symbolize In Huckleberry Finn

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Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known for his pen name Mark Twain once said, “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” In this case, clothes symbolize independent thoughts or actions, which in turn influence and advance society. Twain wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a very controversial novel that centers around its titular character and his journey with a runaway slave named Jim. Throughout the novel, Huck finds himself maturing with his own thoughts instead of being tied down by society’s. Using the characters’ voices, Twain incorporates his ideas that morality and society are assimilative, hypocritical, and cowardly. Even though the novel took place a long time ago, people still assimilate to what society deems as “right” and base their choices off of that. In The Adventures of Huckleberry …show more content…

One example is when Colonel Sherburn is threatened and gives a speech of cowardice of the crowd saying, “The idea of you lynching anybody! It’s amusing. The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a man! … did that make you think you had grit enough to lay your hands on a man? Why, a man’s safe in the hands grit of ten thousand of your kind- as long as it’s day-time and you’re not behind him” (110). Twain is showing that society will play dirty in order to get what it wants, in this case it would be ambushing a target at night instead facing him head on. Sherburn also states the cowardice in the fact that they got an entire crowd to lynch him, saying, “You don’t like trouble and danger. But if only half a man – like Buck Harkness, there – shouts ‘Lynch him, lynch him!’ you’re afraid to back down – afraid you’ll be found out to be what you are – cowards” (111). This expresses how people like Buck Harkness uses mob mentality into doing what they cannot do alone. Sherburn’s speech to the crowd is used by Twain to suggest that morality and society are

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