Superstition is the belief in supernatural causes, when one event causes another without any natural process linking the two events (Wikipedia). The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel about a young boy, Huck Finn, and a slave, Jim, who want to escape their life, so they run off and eventually run into each other and embark on a dangerous and problematic journey. Huck and Jim experience many insoluble events, so they turn to superstition to explain these happenings. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain uses Huck and Jim’s character to show that often times people who are in a lower class or have little to no control over their lives have a strong belief in superstition.
Huck does not have much control over his own life because
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Huck and Jim were in hiding and enjoying a meal when they saw little birds flying a few yards at a time. Jim had predicted that it was going to rain since he had seen the little birds flying that way because when chickens do that it is sign that it will soon rain. When they we talking Huck said, “I was going to catch some of them [little birds], but Jim wouldn’t let me. He said it was death”(47). Jim spoke from experience because Jim’s father had once fell sick, and someone caught a bird and as a result, his father soon died. Before Huck and Jim ran off, Huck snuck out one night to hang out with with some of his friends, and they saw Jim sleeping so they decided to play a trick on him by moving his hat onto a nearby tree branch. Huck explains, “Afterwards Jim said the witches bewitched him and put him in a trance, and rode him all over the state, and then set him under the trees again and hung his hat on a limb to show who done it” (12). Jim blamed this event on the witches because there was no other way he could explain why his hat was moved away from him. Huck and his friend, Tom Sawyer, were easily able to trick Jim because of his strong belief in superstition. Although Jim had superstitions of his own, he also shared some encounters with