Free Essays on Huckleberry Finn

Twain, through this novel, reveals a boy's initiation into manhood. Huck's existence on the raft teaches him about life as it really is. Whenever he goes on shore, he sees the cruelty of society and man's inhumanity to his fellow man. When he returns to the raft, he feels the peace of nature and the nobility of the black slave that shares his journey. Southern society has taught Huck that slaves are sub-human creatures with no feelings, only a piece of property to be bought and sold. At the beginning of the novel, Huck buys into this philosophy without question. He cannot believe that he is helping "a nigger" escape to freedom. It is against everything he has been taught (and he knows Tom Sawyer could never do it.) Huck is amazed to learn that Jim cares deeply about his family, just as a white person cares for his (and more than Pap ever cared for Huck.) He is even more amazed that Jim can have his feelings hurt when Huck plays a trick on him. He never believed that Blacks had feelings. But every time that Huck goes on shore, he loses some of his innocence; he begins to understand the hypocrisy of society. He sees the Grangerfords killed by the Shephardsons, and he sees the Duke and Dauphin easily dupe the townspeople out of their money. Instinctively, Huck realizes that Jim is wiser and worth more than many of the white people on shore. When he is forced to make a decision about turning Jim in or standing by him, Huck decides not to betray his friend, even if it is against everything he has been taught by society and even if he goes to hell for it. By the end of the novel, Huck knows for sure than he cannot fit into the civilized way of life or partake in the hypocrisy of society. He knows himself well enough to realize he must move on. As a result, at the end of the novel, he sets out for new lands to the west, seeking a place that offers truth and freedom.... Free Essays on Huckleberry Finn Free Essays on Huckleberry Finn The Illustrious Huckleberry Finn The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Samuel Clemens is in no way a racist piece of literature. Its author is in no way a racist; he’s quite the opposite. Some believe the book needs to be banned from school’s required reading lists and libraries. These debates come about due to the description of one of the book’s characters Jim, a black run-away slave that befriends Huck through his adventures down the river. Because Jim’s character is described as an uneducated â€Å"nigger† some people have looked upon this characterization as racist. I say, however, that the books main goal was to alert people of racism, and Clemens was just staying accurate to the time in which the story takes place. Jim is depicted as a slave in the south during a period when slavery was a commonly practiced and widely accepted way of life. Slaves in the early 1800’s were not provided any formal education, never allowed any independent thought and were constantly mistreated and abused. The author is merely describing how an undereducated slave spoke in those days and is providing an accurate portrayal of society’s mindset during this time period. In fact, Clemens’ message about blacks during this time was an absolute antithesis of racism. While Jim may be unlearned, he is the only character in the book that truly understands what it means to love. His morals remain unsullied throughout the adventures, and he becomes a father figure for Huck. Clemens uses the term â€Å"nigger† throughout the book. Yet only through his characters dialect and not of his own accord is Jim ever referred to as a â€Å"nigger.† He is merely illustrating the ignorance of people in this time. The use of the word "nigger" is most certainly a very slanderous slang term that is not socially acceptable in present times. It is a word that holds nothing of value for any black American. The word’s meaning is stated by Funk and Wagn... Free Essays on Huckleberry Finn One may wonder why Mark Twain would choose to write an antislavery novel some twenty years after the end of the Civil War. By the early 1880s, Reconstruction, the plan to put the United States back together after the war and integrate freed slaves into society, had hit some shaky ground, although it had not yet failed outright (that wouldn't occur until 1887, three years after the publication of Huck Finn). Still, as Twain worked on his novel, race relations, which seemed to be on a positive path in the years following the Civil War, once again became strained; Jim Crow laws, designed to limit the power of blacks in the South, began a new, insidious effort to oppress. Twain made a powerful decision when he chose to describe a system that no longer existed, when doing so could just lead the unsympathetic reader to claim that things had gotten much better for blacks. One way to analyze this decision is to read slavery as an allegorical representation of the condition of blacks in the United States even after the abolition of slavery. Just as slavery places the noble and moral Jim under the control of the white man, no matter how degraded that white man may be, so too did the more insidious racism that arose near the end of Reconstruction oppress black men for illogical and hypocritical reasons. However, the new racism of the South, less institutionalized and monolithic, was also much less easy to critique. Slavery was a tough practice to justify; but when white Southerners enacted racist laws or policies under a professed motive of self-defense against newly freed blacks, far fewer people, Northern or Southern, saw the act as immoral. In exposing the hypocrisy of slavery, Twain demonstrated how racism distorts the oppressors as much as it does those who are oppressed. Just as the South has never entirely escaped the legacy of slavery, this theme, articulated so subtly by Twain at such an early time, has continued to animate Southern writ... Free Essays on Huckleberry Finn Twain, through this novel, reveals a boy's initiation into manhood. Huck's existence on the raft teaches him about life as it really is. Whenever he goes on shore, he sees the cruelty of society and man's inhumanity to his fellow man. When he returns to the raft, he feels the peace of nature and the nobility of the black slave that shares his journey. Southern society has taught Huck that slaves are sub-human creatures with no feelings, only a piece of property to be bought and sold. At the beginning of the novel, Huck buys into this philosophy without question. He cannot believe that he is helping "a nigger" escape to freedom. It is against everything he has been taught (and he knows Tom Sawyer could never do it.) Huck is amazed to learn that Jim cares deeply about his family, just as a white person cares for his (and more than Pap ever cared for Huck.) He is even more amazed that Jim can have his feelings hurt when Huck plays a trick on him. He never believed that Blacks had feelings. But every time that Huck goes on shore, he loses some of his innocence; he begins to understand the hypocrisy of society. He sees the Grangerfords killed by the Shephardsons, and he sees the Duke and Dauphin easily dupe the townspeople out of their money. Instinctively, Huck realizes that Jim is wiser and worth more than many of the white people on shore. When he is forced to make a decision about turning Jim in or standing by him, Huck decides not to betray his friend, even if it is against everything he has been taught by society and even if he goes to hell for it. By the end of the novel, Huck knows for sure than he cannot fit into the civilized way of life or partake in the hypocrisy of society. He knows himself well enough to realize he must move on. As a result, at the end of the novel, he sets out for new lands to the west, seeking a place that offers truth and freedom.... Free Essays on Huckleberry Finn Superstitions in Huckleberry Finn In the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, there is a lot of superstition. Some examples of superstition in the novel are Huck killing a spider which is bad luck, the hair-ball used to tell fortunes, and the rattle-snake skin Huck touches that brings Huck and Jim good and bad luck. Superstition plays an important role in the novel Huck Finn. In Chapter one Huck sees a spider crawling up his shoulder, so he flipped it off and it went into the flame of the candle. Before he could get it out, it was already shriveled up. Huck didn't need anyone to tell him that it was an bad sign and would give him bad luck. Huck got scared and shook his clothes off, and turned in his tracks three times. He then tied a lock of his hair with a thread to keep the witches away. "You do that when you've lost a horseshoe that you've found, instead of nailing it up over the door, but I hadn't ever heard anybody say it was any way to keep of bad luck when you'd killed a spider."(Twain 5). In chapter four Huck sees Pap's footprints in the snow. So Huck goes to Jim to ask him why Pap is here. Jim gets a hair-ball that is the size of a fist that he took from an ox's stomach. Jim asks the hair-ball; Why is Pap here? But the hair-ball won't answer. Jim says it needs money, so Huck gives Jim a counterfeit quarter. Jim puts the quarter under the hair-ball. The hair-ball talks to Jim and Jim tells Huck that it says. "Yo'ole father doan' know yit what he's a-gwyne to do. Sometimes he spec he'll go 'way, en den ag'in he spec he'll stay. De bes' way is tores' easy en let de ole man take his own way. Dey's two angles hoverin' roun' 'bout him. One uv'em is white en shiny, en t'other one is black. De white one gits him to go right a little while, den de black one sil in en gust it all up. A bo...