Annotated Bibliography On Huckleberry Finn

Laura Post

Huck Finn Scholarly Article

“I didn’t want to go back to the widow’s any more and be so cramped up and sivilized, as they called it.” (35). Huckleberry Finn, the protagonist of the famous novel by Mark Twain, deliberately averts being “sivilized” by the adults of the story. While closely analyzing Huck Finn’s society, there is no wonder why. Mark Twain’s novel, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” should be studied in high school because it shows the hypocrisy in a so called “civilized” society. Twain exposes the mendacity in the way adults at the time believed they were civilized, but simultaneously dehumanized the African American race. This book is important to society now, because it teaches teenagers how to recognize racism

After Huckleberry tells Miss Watson that he doesn’t care about going to heaven, she gets angry with him and explains how, “she was going to live in the good place” (11). Miss Watson is constantly lecturing Huckleberry “to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it.” (19). When Huckleberry asks her why he can’t make things magically appear by praying, she tells him that “the thing a body could get by praying was ‘spiritual gifts’” (19). She also tells Huck to “help other people, and do everything I could for other people, and look out for them all the time, and never think about myself.” (19). Although Miss Watson teaches Huckleberry all of these lessons, she is also a slave owner and fails to see that slavery contradicts almost everything she supposedly believes

Huckleberry meets Jim, a runaway slave, after he escapes his abusive father to live on his own. As Jim and Huck make their way down the Mississippi river to Jim’s freedom, Huckleberry struggles with two contrasting voices in his head. He knows that he is going against his society’s morals by helping a slave run away, but in the back of his mind he also knows that it would be wrong to turn Jim in. Huck debates the issue and tells himself “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” (228) when he decides to not turn Jim in. Huck’s conclusion that he will go to hell when he is actually doing the ethical thing by helping Jim, presents the hypocrisy in society’s religious assumptions. Huckleberry rebels against unjust social norms that African Americans are considered “property” and cannot have free will. Twain is teaching readers that social “norms” aren’t always righteous and should always be