Examples Of Generalization In Huckleberry Finn

General Realization

There are millions are different cultures in the world, and it is impossible to fully understand all of the people that are different than ourselves. Because of this, people often make inferences about other cultures in order to grasp the intricacies of their societies. In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, Angelou tells the story of her growing up with her brother, Bailey, in the post-war south and her struggles with displacement and racial tension throughout her adolescence. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, a young white boy in the antebellum south named Huck runs away with a slave named Jim is faced with physical and moral dilemmas during their quest for freedom. Both of the books

Angelou develops the theme through her and Bailey’s generalizations of that helped her grasp her fast changing world and come to an understanding. In Huck Finn, people make assumptions in order to protect themselves from danger.

Throughout her childhood, Angelou understood many many racial issues and conflicts by generalizing them. For example, she uses a simple boxing match as a metaphor for the bigger picture, and accepts that God is white based on the structure of her society; Additionally, at 11 years old, her brother Bailey makes generalizations about sex in order to comprehend it. While Maya is living in Stamps, Arkansas, the whole town gathers in The Store to listen to a boxing match between a white man and Joe Louis. When it looks like the black man is going to lose, Maya comments, “My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching…” (Angelou 113). Maya is using the fight as a metaphor to understand the entire

While Huck is still living with the Widow Douglas, he’s sitting in alone in his room when a spider crawls up his shoulders. Huck accidentally kills it, and becomes terrified of the bad luck it might bring. He writes that, “I got up and turned around in my tracks 3 times and crossed my breast every time; and then I tied up a little lock of my hair with a thread to keep witches away”(13). Because he is a young boy, Finn’s superstitions and morals are not always correct. However, these assumptions are his way of protecting himself from bad luck and he would feel he was in danger if he hadn’t done them. Shortly after, Jim and Huck meet on Jackson’s Island. As Jim is explaining to Huck why he ran away, he says that Miss Watson previously claimed that she would never sell Jim down south, where slaves were treated much worse. However, he says, “I noticed dey wuz a [n-word] trader roun’ de place considerable lately, en I begin to git oneasy” (Twain 50). The stakes in this situation are far too high for Jim to simply hope that Miss Watson will keep her word. Therefore, he has to assume that she, and the slave-trader can’t be trusted in order to