Huckleberry Finn Character Analysis

Can you imagine being an abused teenager growing up 170 years ago in rural Missouri? Your father is a struggling alcoholic who actually kidnaps you from a poor widow lady who is trying to raise you. There are no cell phones, television, or vehicles for transportation. That’s exactly what happens in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published by Mark Twain in the late 1800’s. In this novel the main character, Huckleberry Finn, becomes friends with a slave named Jim who is owned by Ms. Watson. The widow Douglas is not Huck’s mother but she is trying to raise him. The setting is in several small towns along the Mississippi river and nearby Jackson Island. Throughout the novel we see that a teenager and a grown up slave are struggling, they

He relates to this because he was trying to get away from his abusive father. His dad would go into town to get alcohol and leave Huck alone in the cabin. “But by-and-by pap got too handy with his hick’ry, and I couldn’t stand it. I was all over welts. He got to going away so much, too, and locking me in. Once he locked me in and was gone three days. It was dreadful lonesome.” (32) Huck’s father, Pap, could not stop drinking and when he would drink he would take all his anger on his son and physically abuse him. Huck didn’t really like the way his father was treating him, so he faked his own death, killed a pig with his fathers rifle and took the blood from the pig and put it on an axe. Then he put strands of his hair on the axe and dragged the pig around Paps cabin. He dragged the dead pig to the river, leaving a trail of blood, so that people would think he had been killed. He took pap’s rifle and canoe, and started on his journey to freedom. Huck goes down stream on the Mississippi River and lands at Jacksons Island. Usually, when a person is eager to escape and begin a journey to freedom,he don’t know how to begin, but fortunately for Huck, he guessed right when he chose the canoe. “I knowed I was all right now. Nobody else would come-a-hunting after me. I got my traps out of the canoe and made me a nice camp in the thick woods.”