In Huck Finn, by Mark Twain, the reader experiences the life and adventure of a southern child floating along down the Mississippi with a fugitive slavei In the story Huckleberry Firm is used by Twain to portray a hero. While the thought of a small boy from the deep south who can’t distinguish to from too or two may seem silly, his morals which remained uncorrupted through the book and his questioning of social norm on some gruesome issues, such as slaveryi. The Hero’s role that Huck assumes from the moment he escapes his father‘s custody to the very end of the novel is a great commentary on the rules of society and the unevenness of the structure and order of life. The first major event that calls for Huck to step into the limelight of heroics comes when he learns of his father’s aliveness. Prior to this event, Huck had a very large sum of money acquired for the capture of a band of robbers.
When he sees that his pa is back in town, he runs to his old friend and wealth manager Judge Thatcher and gives him the whole of six thousand dollars to prevent it from falling into the hands of an abusive drunkard of a father. After his father regains custody of Huck they move back to an old log cabin where Huck is kept locked up day and night, he escapes down river and meets the runaway slave of his previous caretaker, Jim. Here we can see the morality that twain has put into Huck. Jim pleads to Huck to not report him and Huck promises to keep his word in this response “I’ll stick to it, Honest injun, I will, People would call me a low»down Abolitionist and despise me for keeping mum -» but that don’t make no differences.” Here is the first big example of Huck going against the normal social order. He does not care that he will be disgraced if he and Jim are ever found out, he keeps a promise, even to someone who, at the time, isn’t even considered a persons.
Much later in the story we see a different kind of morale from Huck, one that challenges some of the romanticist ideas that his foil, Tom Sawyer, brings to the table. In chapter 35, when Jim is held captive, Huck and Tom are hatching an escape plan. Tom, having read great epics about prison and prison breaks insist on very complicated and ludicrous plans. One of them is to steal tin plates so that Jim may scribble on them cryptic messages and then throw them out the window. Huck sees this wasteful stealing as morally wrong as well as foolisht “‘Well, then, what’s the sense in wasting the plates?n.it’s somebody’s plates, ain’t it?”’ Twain is not so much attacking stealing here, as Huck does much stealing in other chapters. He is more, attacking the wastefulness and foolishness of some people, who would simply waste a tin plate because they read about someone doing it in a book Twain’s voice is very much portrayed through the narration of Huck Finn Even the style he chooses, writing in phonetics and speaking how.
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Huck would actually speak, is a representation of the south and un-educatedness, Huck, a boy with almost no education who is afraid of being ‘sivilized‘ plays the role of a moral hero in a time where an evil system of people trafficking was accepted. Giving the Book some perspective, Twain was born when slavery was still present, he lived through the civil war, he saw what was going on in the south first-hand Huck is perhaps, a portrayal of Twain’s childhood self, an innocent form who sees the adult world and questions there morals and philosophies, like Huck does. “She took me in the closet and prayed, but nothing come of it She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn’t sot” Huck doesn‘t deny any existence in a deity here, he simply challenges the concept that through prayer one can prosper.
Twain’s voice flowing through the novel and Huck is perhaps strongest on slavery. Throughout the work Huck and Jim are travelling as fugitives and yet the only crime that Jim has committed is wanting to be free The language used, while very derogatory, displays the way blacks were regarded in the south. When we first meet Huck’s dad, he goes on about how free blacks are a disgrace “There was a free n —– there from Ohio — a mulatter, most as white as a white man, He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had“. why, he wouldn’t a give me the road ifl hadn’t shoved him out o’ the way. I says to the people, why ain’t this n — put up at auction and sold?“ Huck doesn’t respond to this, and perhaps it is his hatred of his dad that made him also hate slavery in the first place Huckleberry Firm by Mark Twain spawns an unlikely moral heror Twain uses Huck to challenge and commentate on social structure and the way that we go about life.
Through misspelled dialogue and idioms that have lost their meanings the normal ways of life are challenged by a young innocent thinker who didn’t want to be sivilizedi Symbolic Archetypes. As Huck and Jim are travelling down the Mississippi, the situations that they encounter have a somewhat natural flow, or progression. The river, the great body of water that all seem to move down through, represents the times and lives that Huck and Jim have, Twain uses the lazy floating of the Mississippi in clever ways, to signify the passing of time and the sometimes unexpected changes of plans that we all encounter in life.
The Mississippi river in Huckleberry Firm is one of the main locations of the story. Huck firsts gets on the river after he escapes from his fathers captivity. This is symbolically the equivalent of a child growing up and getting tossed into the ‘real world’. Huck meets Jim further down the river, just as in life you meet new people, they travel together and half to part ways for a while and then they return back to the same path. Somewhere down the river Huck and Jim encounter a wrecked house floating along with a dead body inside, “It’s a dead man. Yes, indeedynCome in, Huck, but doan’ look at his face,” is the only thing Jim has to comment on when they discover the body While his dialogue may seem very simple, it actually is an analogy is how close we are, on the river of life, to death, and how we wish not to talk of death once it has happened.
Later we learn that the body was Huck’s dad, which is another example of the river of the life cycle with death ever-present. Jim and Huck talk a lot during their time lazily floating down the river, Huck tells Jim that “these kinds of things was adventures; but he said he didn’t want no more adventures.” Yet, Despite Jim’s reluctance of adventuring the river flows on. Twain‘s Mississippi carries the main characters through the story, just as some driving force carries us through life. All of the events that take place on the river, all of the mischief and adventure that Huck and Jim go through is all swept away with the lazing of the river, Every time Huck and Jim wink their eyes for some sleep, the river pushes them on to a new adventure, neither of them will be able to predict, just as each new day we cannot predict what will happen. It is a very poetic symbol, ironic because Twain took little stock in most romantic pieces.
The river is the symbolic life force and timeline in Huck Finn, Twain writes each new chapter as a new chapter of the characters life a little more down river. Each new adventure leads them back to the river, where even the dead end up, Twain ultimately symbolizes the passing of life and the style living day to day, and even though we may lose some, and some may perish, the river flows on Situational Archetypes. In Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain the characters are all two types of people, either they are dumb, or intelligent However not all of the characters that are completely uneducated are the stupid ones Innate Wisdom versus the educated stupidity is a big archetype in Huck Finn from the beginning Twain uses the ignorant ‘educated‘ to reinforce the theme that something is wrong with the social order of things, One of the first major events of the novel is the reappearance of Huck’s father and how he is able to win custody of l-Iuck back.
There is a new judge in town, one who is apparently had at judging character, despite his education, or as Huck says> “The judge [Thatcher] and the widow went to law to get the court to take me away from himwbut it was a new judge that had just come, and he didn’t know the old man; so he said courts mustn’t interfere and separate families if they could help it; said he’d ruther not take a child away from its father.” Huck’s father easily cons this college graduate so successfully that he even gets the judge to buy him a suit Other times in the story, the characters give their insights on the way the world is, however it is skewed because of the lack of education that they‘ve had. In chapter 9, Huck and Jim talk about the workings of the world. Jim has some good thoughts about, like how he responds to a talk about Solomon, “Dey say Sollermun de wises’ man dat ever live‘. I doan’ take no stock in dat, Bekase why: would a wise man want to live in de mids’ er sich a blim-blammin’ all de time? No ‘deed he wouldn’t.”
Jim has a very good way of thinking, however he has lived his whole life as a slave and he therefore has no perspective on what the life of a king is really like. Still Jim does prove to be much wiser than some of the other characters that believed themselves to be smarter than Jim, Twain is very precise in the way he words each sentence of dialogue, making it so that each character seems to fling weighted words in even normal conversations. The ignorance of some of the learned individuals is mainly what Twain is calling out The strangest thing is that the ones who are labeled ‘ignorant,’ in society are the ones that do most of the books deepest thinking. The Innate wisdom versus educated stupidity archetype is very prominent in Huck Finn Twain clearly represented the fact Ihatjust because you have a PhD on your wall does not mean you are better than anybody else, In the end Twain is really showing us not to judge a book by it’s cover.
