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What Is Minimalism In Huck Finn

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Minimalism at it's core is essentially “freedom from the modern mania to possess”, stated by Joshua Becker, an author for multiple minimalist articles and one of the leading voices in the modern simplicity movement. To put in other terms, minimalists seek freedom from civilizations standards and expectations. This need for freedom from civilization is also displayed in the novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. The novel begins with Huck escaping society's attempt to civilize him by faking his own death where he goes to Jackson’s Island and finds Jim, a runaway slave, and sets out on the Mississippi river. Although Huck and Jim find peace on the river, they are unable to escape the evils of civilization. Later in the …show more content…

Even when Pap kidnapped Huck, he was satisfied in the dirt-floor shack, depending upon fishing and trading in town. Huck said, "it was kind of lazy and jolly, laying off comfortable all day, smoking and fishing, and no books nor study" (Twain 24). Huck had not rejected society all-together, rather he chose a level of society that required less work. Far from living in harmony with the outside world, he and Pap depended upon ammunition, fishing hooks ammunition, and saws, axes, and guns. Furthermore, Huck's quest to "light out" (Twain 293) into the new is determined by his attachment to civilization. Bennett Kravitz, a teacher of American Studies at the University of Haifa in Israel, claims that “[Huck] is unable to avoid relying on the materials of the world he abandoned… [the] reconstituted cultural materials of a civilization that Huck desperately seeks to leave forever”. In other terms, Huck depends upon the artifacts of civilization to build his new world. While he is resourceful enough to kill his pig and escape from Pap, he relies on civilizations materials such as the raft and the borrowed food. To conclude, Huck connects with nature more so than civilization, however, still relies on civilization as he is dependent on civilizations creations to survive and, while he rejected society, he never truly abandoned it

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