Huckleberry Finn Literary Analysis

From the first colonists of North America, to the battle for civil rights in the 1960s, and to our everyday lives, America has struggled with racism and has been plagued by its effects. As said by Eugene Ionesco, “Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.” Ideas about others are often created by the lack of knowledge of someone or having learned these ideas from an outside source; those ideas end up creating a gap in our society. The way in which we can counter that is through suffering and dealing with those ideas, and believing that some time in the future we can mend the gap and promote equality with one another. The novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, shows the ideologies that society is composed

The story shows a young boy who lives in a neighborhood with a peculiar family that nobody seems to know anything about. This family does everything differently than most other families, they don't watch television as well as they eat dinner at a completely different time. Sedaris tells the story through the mind of a young boy, which allows us to see how these assumptions about others are made. The boy knows absolutely nothing about the family and because of this he begins to make assumptions about them. At times saying things like “They had no idea how puny their lives were,” and “What must it be like to be so ignorant and alone? Could a normal person even imagine it?” (Sedaris 1-2). While in reality, she knows absolutely nothing about their lives. The short story promotes the idea that the assumptions people make about one another are based off of the lack of knowledge about the other. The main character ends up realizing that he could become friends with the Tomkey children, but he gets such a good feeling from pitying them that he decides not to. With this he starts to process these assumptions and it makes him feel good to put someone below him. As he sits on his bed gorging himself with candy that he does not even like his mom tells him to take a look at himself. Looking back he realizes that he was truly a horrible human being for doing such a thing to a family who did not deserve it. At the time, he was overcome by feelings that morphed from “pity into something hard and ugly” towards the Tomkey family. He blamed the Tomkey’s unusual way of life for forcing him to act like he did. All of these feelings that the boy had were based off of an unknown perception that he had of the Tomkey family because he knew so little about them. This promotes the idea that when society sees something as different or peculiar they tend to stay away from those things,